The UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has declared that it will permanently make its Digital Sandbox accessible starting from August 1, 2023.
By launching the Digital Sandbox on a permanent basis, the financial regulatory body will maintain its vigilant oversight over the early product development approaches of Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs), enabling more effective monitoring. This platform provides a testing environment where the regulator can offer support and aid in the initial stages of developing financial products and services.
Having enlisted the UK-based fintech NayaOne to develop and operate the Digital Sandbox in April this year, the FCA’s resulting offering has, until now, only been available to participants via associated pilots and TechSprints.
The permanent launch of the sandbox has extended access to not only a wider range of developers, but also to data providers, which will now be able to apply to list their data on the platform and consequently generate traffic and insights from its use.
The sandbox’s permanent features include access to approximately 200 different types of data sets and over 1000 APIs, concerning payments and transactions data, social media data, investment, Companies House and credit data, which together will support the testing and validation of new products and services.
Adjoining features include an “integrated development environment” to ensure in-development data security, the ability to connect with other teams, observers and mentors and a so-called “observation deck” to allow for the external observation of in-flight product testing.
The sandbox and its supporting features will be accessible to those working in sectors including banking, investment, lending, payments, insurance and pension, among others.
The FCA has also confirmed that the approval process to participate in the sandbox will take a maximum of four weeks.