Financial services are an important part of our everyday lives- from making payments, to borrowing money, getting financial advice, taking out insurance and saving for the future.
In the financial services sector, smaller businesses have struggled to keep up with big financial institutions when it comes to harnessing the latest technologies, potentially missing out on opportunities to build their businesses and serve new customer bases.
These smaller financial services firms will soon be able to benefit from an innovative national initiative. Among four universities, the University of Bristol is leading a first-of-its-kind £1.8 million programme to quicken innovation adoption in SMEs (small and medium-sized enterprises) and mid-tier financial services firms to help boost their productivity and competitiveness.
Funded by Innovate UK and Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), the innovation adoption accelerator, called future finance for all, will work closely with smaller financial services firms to recognize the tasks which they face and discover how technology and innovation can help to avoid issues and make a tangible difference to their businesses. The accelerator is designed to be highly combined, bringing together smaller financial services firms with experts in technology and innovation to work together to find solutions. Eventually, the aim is to help these smaller financial services firms better serve the needs of their existing customers but also to reach new customer bases, whether those are individuals or enterprises.
Professor Sharon Collard, Director of the Personal Finance Research Centre said, it is essential for participants to have access to a decent financial service. This is a potential ‘market making opportunity’ for new financial product and service innovation delivered by smaller firms that could help to improve access and use of financial services for the millions of UK consumers-individuals, SMEs- who remain underserved and self-employed people.
The accelerator will be delivered in collaboration with SET squared, leveraging extensive experience of providing world-class innovation programs for SMEs across the UK, with broader insight being unlocked through the additional support of the University of the West of England Bristol, the University of Glasgow, Glasgow Caledonian University and FinTech West.
Marty Reid, Executive Director of the SET squared Partnership said, new technologies are certainly challenging to implement in controlled markets like financial services which can stifle innovation.
Stuart Harrison, Director at FinTech West said, this is an extremely exciting and important project which we are happy to be a part of. With universities, we already work closely on a number of initiatives and this will further deliver benefits to the sector through the close collaboration of academia and industry.
