On 13 October 2025, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) announced that it would be entering into a new partnership and launching two tech sprints, ahead of launching the open finance roadmap and strategy,

Background

The FCA explained that, as set out in its letter to the Prime Minister in January, it had committed to completing work to help accelerate digital innovation, including to develop open finance, prioritising small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) lending.

Overview

The FCA highlighted that it has recently commissioned work on the benefits of open banking and open finance, which acknowledged that there would be trade-offs that regulators would need to consider, and it further set out that in September it had launched its Smart Data Accelerator.  In this announcement, the FCA explained that it will now be collaborating with a new partner (Raidiam) to use their testing environment, allowing firms participating in the Smart Data Accelerator to simulate and test data sharing.

The FCA further explained that it will be running two sprints between 17 November 2025 and 12 February 2026, with a focus on mortgages and SMEs, and that the sprints are open for registration until 2 November.