Find out about Amplified Global, a start-up which has worked with all 3 of our main innovation services.
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Technology is rapidly changing our financial lives. Be it the way you pay for something, save, borrow or invest your money.
Innovations like contactless payments, for example, have become the norm. Use of contactless cards in the UK grew from just 3% of all transactions in 2015 to 32% in 2021 according to UK Finance.
Change can be really positive for consumers, but the challenges facing firms doing something which may never have been done before, are considerable. Particularly for small firms and start-ups.
Offering a helping hand
Our rules can be daunting for some new firms but our Innovation Hub is playing its part in helping innovative products and services flourish.
Amplified Global is one tech start-up which has faced that challenge and developed its business, working with all 3 of our main innovation services since first contacting us in 2019.
We’ve all no doubt struggled to understand complicated Terms and Conditions (T&Cs) when buying or signing up something. That’s the problem the firm has set out to solve using artificial intelligence (AI), and they approached us for a helping hand.
A European Commission study published in 2020 into consumers’ attitudes towards T&Cs, found that around 90% of people went ahead and accepted the T&Cs on a website without opening them.
This firm’s software uses AI and machine learning to scan over documents, break it up into digestible sections, and step-by-step, explain each section in easy-to-understand language.
We could see from this firm’s application that they would benefit from the Innovation team’s support, and importantly their product was genuinely innovative. It also met our other criteria, such as being potentially beneficial to consumers, including vulnerable consumers, who may be less able to cope with financial loss.
Helping innovative products and service to reach the market
Our Innovation Pathways team gave the firm access to FCA experts who helped the firm’s founders better understand things such as Consumer Duty and rules around fair treatment of vulnerable consumers from an early stage.
Next the firm went on to work with our Digital Sandbox to begin testing their software in a risk-free environment with synthetic data sets. This proved to be a valuable step, allowing the firm to train and develop their AI technology without the risk of interacting with real consumers.
And now Amplified Global is embarking on a new stage in its development, having been accepted into our Regulatory Sandbox in July 2022. This will allow them to test their technology with real consumers but in a controlled way.
Find out more by visiting our Innovation Hub.