Bank of England FinTech Accelerator Proofs of Concept

By Jonathan Lawrence and Judith Rinearson

On July 10, 2017, the Bank of England (the “Bank”) published summaries of their third round of Proofs of Concept (“PoC”), completed by its FinTech Accelerator.

The FinTech Accelerator was established in 2016, and works in partnership with firms to understand the new technology they may be working with and how FinTech innovations could be utilised within central banking. These PoC provide valuable understanding in respect of FinTech trends and support to its continued development by providing a platform for those firms to demonstrate their solutions for real issues and knowledge from BoE experts.

The third round of the PoC assessed 4 core elements of the Bank’s work:

• Analysing large scale supervisory data sets;
• Executing high-value payments across currencies and borders;
• Identifying and applying cross-cutting legal themes from regulatory enforcement actions; and
• Measuring performance on the Bank’s internal projects portfolio.

The Bank worked with 4 different FinTechs, for which they provided individual write-ups to explain the extent of each project, to cover each area of the Bank’s work noted. Enforcd, a global regulatory enforcement compliance organisation, worked with the Regulatory Action Division to identify how technology will impact compliance with regulations and best practice; Experimentus, a software quality management consultancy, analysed best practices for effective KPI reporting; Mindbridge AI, a machine learning and artificial intelligence firm, explored the analytical value of using AI tools to detect anomalies in data sets and Ripple, a global currency exchange and remittance company, looked into the synchronised movement of two different currencies using distributed ledger technology.

According to the July 10 press release, emphasis was on “how much central banks potentially have to gain from continued engagement with the sector”.

The Accelerator will be releasing the successful firms for its fourth round of PoCs shortly.