For several years, open finance has been widely discussed as the next step after open banking. Consultations, policy papers and industry forums have outlined the potential. Yet progress often slowed when it came to practical implementation.
The Financial Conduct Authority’s new partnership to accelerate open finance delivery marks a shift in direction. Instead of debating frameworks, the focus is now on building and testing real solutions.
This matters because innovation moves forward when experimentation becomes evidence.
And evidence is what drives adoption.
Why Open Finance Matters Now
Open banking demonstrated that secure data sharing can unlock new services and better customer experiences. Aggregation tools, payment innovation and improved financial management services followed once standards and infrastructure were in place.
Open finance extends this model beyond payments into areas such as:
- Mortgages and lending
- Savings and investments
- Insurance and pensions
- SME financial services
The promise is compelling. Better data access can improve affordability checks, reduce onboarding friction, support smarter underwriting and enable fairer access to finance.
But execution remains difficult. Firms must still answer practical questions:
- How do we safely share and test financial data?
- How do standards work across institutions?
- How do we validate solutions before deployment?
- How do regulators gain confidence in new models?
This is where the FCA’s Smart Data Accelerator comes in.
What Is the Smart Data Accelerator?
The Smart Data Accelerator is part of the FCA’s innovation ecosystem. It provides a secure environment where firms can develop and test open finance use cases before moving into production.
Participants can:
- Test interoperability between providers
- Validate data-sharing models safely
- Identify regulatory and operational risks early
- Build and iterate proofs of concept using synthetic data
Importantly, this is not just a sandbox for isolated experiments. The Accelerator supports broader industry collaboration and policy testing, helping align technical delivery with regulatory expectations.
It creates a bridge between innovation teams and supervisory understanding.
TechSprints: Delivery in Action
A core component of the programme is a series of Smart Data TechSprints focused on real market challenges.
Two initial sprints focused on:
- Improving access to finance for SMEs
- Reducing friction and inefficiency in mortgage journeys
These sprints bring together banks, fintechs, technology providers and regulators to build and test solutions in a structured environment.
The recent showcase events demonstrate that tangible outcomes are already emerging, moving discussions from theory into practical prototypes and validated approaches.
What stood out during the showcase was not just the technology, but the momentum. A packed room of regulators, lenders and innovators pointed to something shifting – open finance moving from roadmap discussion into delivery reality.
As Colin Payne from the FCA summarised during the showcase, “Data doesn’t change markets. Application does.”
Teams moved beyond dashboards and prototypes to test how open finance data can unlock smarter SME lending, improve mortgage journeys and affordability insights, and reduce friction in regulated decision-making.
One attendee captured the shift clearly: “Smart data creates clarity. Real-world application creates confidence.”
In regulated markets, success is not just about proving data works, but proving decisions made using that data stand up in real-world conditions.
The key shift here is simple: solutions are being tested before market deployment, not after problems appear.
Showcase Day: Solutions Moving Into Practice
The Accelerator’s mortgage and SME finance TechSprints concluded with a Showcase Day, where participating teams presented the solutions developed during the programme.
Over a three-month period, participants from across financial services collaborated in a bespoke development environment built in partnership with NayaOne, BigSpark and Raidiam, testing how open finance and smart data could be applied to real delivery challenges.
The showcase provided regulators and industry participants with practical insight into how open finance solutions can operate in production environments, while helping shape regulatory understanding of future implementation models.
The strong turnout at the showcase reflected growing industry demand to move beyond open finance theory into solutions that can operate safely in regulated environments.
The Problems Being Solved
The TechSprints focused on real-world delivery challenges, ensuring innovation efforts target tangible outcomes rather than abstract experimentation.
SME Finance challenges addressed
- Unlocking access to finance for micro and early-stage SMEs by overcoming thin credit profiles through richer, consent-driven data sharing.
- Enabling SMEs to better manage their financial lifecycle through improved forecasting, financial management and smarter debt decisions.
- Simplifying mortgage and remortgage journeys using open finance data to enable faster, more personalised decisions and better consumer outcomes.
- Helping consumers make informed decisions about mortgage overpayments, reducing long-term debt burdens through improved financial visibility.
By tackling these practical challenges, the Accelerator demonstrates how open finance can improve outcomes for both consumers and businesses.
Why This Matters for Financial Institutions
Innovation programmes frequently stall because practical delivery is complex. Firms face obstacles such as:
- Limited safe testing environments
- Challenges sharing realistic data
- Long vendor integration timelines
- Compliance and risk concerns slowing experimentation
Structured environments like the Accelerator allow institutions to validate solutions before committing to production.
This reduces risk while accelerating learning.
Institutions engaging early gain insight into emerging standards and ecosystem partnerships, positioning themselves ahead of broader market adoption.
Collaboration Over Isolation
Open banking showed that ecosystem collaboration drives progress faster than isolated innovation.
The Accelerator builds on that lesson. Firms, regulators and vendors collaborate in shared environments rather than experimenting independently.
The programme also reflects a broader shift in how regulation itself operates. Rather than acting purely as a rule-setter reacting to innovation, regulators are increasingly becoming system architects and ecosystem convenors – bringing industry and technology partners together to solve delivery challenges collaboratively
The benefits are clear:
- Regulators gain earlier visibility into emerging risks and opportunities
- Financial institutions de-risk innovation
- Technology vendors validate solutions faster
- Customers ultimately benefit from improved products sooner
Innovation works best when it is structured, time-bound and evidence-led.
What Happens Next?
Open finance will not appear overnight, but the direction is now clear. The focus is shifting from consultation to implementation.
The next stage involves:
- Scaling tested use cases into production environments
- Aligning industry standards and interoperability
- Expanding successful models across financial services
Organisations participating today will help shape tomorrow’s operating environment.
Turning Innovation into Delivery
Innovation rarely fails because of ideas. It fails because delivery is hard.
Controlled testing environments allow firms to experiment safely, validate solutions earlier and deploy with greater confidence.
That is the real significance of the FCA’s Accelerator. It turns ambition into accountable progress.
Programmes like the Smart Data Accelerator exist not simply to encourage innovation, but to de-risk it – pressure-testing solutions before deployment and helping firms move from experimentation to implementation with confidence.
Exploring Innovation Safely
At NayaOne, we help financial institutions, regulators and enterprises test, validate and deliver innovation through secure sandbox environments, synthetic data and pre-integrated vendor ecosystems.
If your organisation is exploring open finance, AI-driven services or vendor innovation, the first step is not deployment. It is validation.
Get in touch to explore how your next innovation can move from concept to production with confidence.
