What support does the FCA offer to firms who want to test their AI ideas?

Today we have the exciting news that the FCA are collaborating with Nvidia to enhance the Digital Sandbox. 

If you are an entity wanting to innovate in the financial services space then you need to give serious consideration to engaging and collaborating with the FCA as it continues in its efforts to support the development of safe and responsible AI capabilities throughout the sector and remove the current blockers to transformation.

Confidence

A lack of confidence has often been cited as one of those current blockers. One way to overcome the confidence blocker is to get more familiar with what the FCA is working on in its various AI-related initiatives.

Here is a quick guide to two of the latest AI-related initiatives:

What's the Digital Sandbox?

The Digital Sandbox is part of the FCA's AI Lab. The AI Lab includes the Supercharged Sandbox, AI Live Testing, and the AI Spotlight (together with some initiatives (including the AI Sprint and Input Zone) that have now closed but were part of the wider effort to inform the regulatory approach and enable stakeholders to get involved). 

The AI Lab is a suite of services within which the FCA is seeking to evolve its understanding of risk and opportunity, inform the regulatory approach, and support innovators with ‘access to greater computing capabilities, enhanced datasets, and more advanced tooling’. You can apply to get access to the Supercharged Sandbox using the FCA's Innovation Platform and the application opportunity is open now with a view to early stage proof of concepts being tested in Autumn.

Applications will need to:

• outline what it is that you are hoping to build or test;
• explain the sector specific ‘challenge or opportunity’ that your project seeks to address;
• indicate the technical resources that you will need;
• provide an impact statement about the intended benefits; and
• describe the reason why your approach is ‘novel or different’. 

What's Live Testing?

We provided some details on the FCA's Live Testing initiative in a previous article focused on firms that have developed an AI solution beyond the proof-of-concept stage and “are ready and willing to deploy AI models into live markets”. For firms in this position, the live testing environment could provide a unique and attractive opportunity to test and develop with the benefit of the FCA's computing power, data sets, testing capabilities and expertise in AI and regulation. The Engagement Paper on Live Testing remains open until this Friday, 13 June.

Discovery stage

Unlike the Live Testing initiative, which is designed for firms that are well advanced along their AI journey, the Supercharged Sandbox is intended for those at an earlier stage, ‘the discovery and experiment phase’, specifically to include those who might have ideas to explore but lack the capabilities or resources to do so. This new collaboration ‘provides firms with a secure environment to explore AI innovations using NVIDIA’s full stack accelerated computing platform, supporting industry-wide growth and efficiency’. 

The way forward

The FCA is committed to working collaboratively with firms to evolve learning and explore opportunities that AI can bring to the financial services sector, including improved efficiency, better data, greater accuracy and enhanced risk management, if harnessed responsibly and safely.  

Regulatory focus

If you would like to discuss how current or future regulations impact what you do with AI, please contact me, Tom Whittaker, or Martin Cook. You can meet our financial services experts here and our technology experts here.

You can read more thought-leadership like this by subscribing to our monthly financial services regulation update by clicking here and clicking here for our AI blog and here for our AI newsletter. 

Through a new collaboration, announced today, firms will have the opportunity to experiment with AI using NVIDIA accelerated computing and NVIDIA AI Enterprise Software. This Supercharged Sandbox will give firms access to better data, technical expertise and regulatory support to speed up innovation. It is open to any financial services firm looking to innovate and experiment with AI.

https://www.fca.org.uk/news/press-releases/fca-allows-firms-experiment-ai-alongside-nvidia