Innovate Finance CEO Update – December 2025
Dear Member,
I hope this finds you well in the run up to the holiday season. 2025 has been yet another tremendous year for UK FinTech and the entire UK innovation community, and we here at Innovate Finance have been honoured to serve as your voice. It has been a jam-packed final quarter of the year, and we are already gearing up for what will no doubt be an exciting and busy 2026.
You can see Innovate Finance 2025 Highlights here.
New Members
Firstly, I am so pleased to welcome the following new members to the Innovate Finance community: Bumper, Capgemini, EazzyTranzact, Fingleton, Hyperlayer, Platform D, RetailBook, Saible, Stratiphy, Visa, Yaspa, 56 Degrees North
Member Events & Engagement
Our busy autumn agenda kicked off with a successful Labour Party Conference visit at the end of September, where Innovate Finance once again hosted our FinTech Drinks Reception and welcomed the Economic Secretary to the Treasury, Lucy Rigby MP, alongside our members and also representatives from the FCA. A special thank you to our partner and reception host EY, and our sponsors Clearscore and Starling Bank.
October saw the 5th annual edition of our FinTech as a Force for Good Forum, “FinTech in a Changing World”, which welcomed more than 300 senior leaders to The London Conference Centre at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. A huge thank you to all of our phenomenal speakers who joined us on the day to discuss the increasingly important role of innovation and financial technology in the midst of a shifting geopolitical landscape. Thank you to our host, and also to our brilliant sponsors of the event, Atom Bank, Goldcrest Partners, OpenPayd, Robinhood and Zilch. During the conference we hosted a private roundtable discussion for our Unicorn Council members with Sam Woods, Deputy Governor for Prudential Regulation and Chief Executive Officer of the Prudential Regulation Authority to discuss proportionate treatment of challenger banks; the scaleup unit; and the UK approach to stablecoin. We also held a roundtable in collaboration with ADS Group, to explore how FinTech and SME lenders can support the defense sector.
Earlier in October we hosted our CFO Dinner in collaboration with S&W, welcoming the London Stock Exchange to give an overview on PISCES developments and a market update. This was followed by our General Counsel Meetup in partnership with Baker McKenzie, where we discussed how to scale your business in a FCA-regulated environment. In addition, we ran two of our regional Innovate Finance Pitch 360 across the UK events in October, where we celebrated the amazing innovators and FinTechs outside of London: Pitch 360 Bristol and Pitch 360 Birmingham. Congratulations to the winners and all the participants!
In October I was also hugely privileged and honoured to accompany the Rt Hon Sir Keir Starmer, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, and around 100 other business leaders on the PM’s trade delegation to Mumbai, India to help represent the UK FinTech sector alongside a number of our members. It was inspiring to attend and speak at the Mumbai FinTech Festival while there, and to see the impact of the UK’s leadership in financial innovation on the global stage.
Our busy calendar of events continued in November, as we hosted our 2nd annual Power Up FinTech Startup Forum, convening the CEOs of our startup and scaleup FinTechs. Thank you to Google, Deel and BPI Seven HIlls who led key sessions on how to grow and build your business. Our team also traveled to Singapore for the Singapore FinTech Festival, where we hosted a roundtable on “The Expansion Equation: FinTech Success In Singapore and the UK” in collaboration with our Partner Hogan Lovells. It was fantastic to have Jessica Rusu, Chief Data, Information and Intelligence Officer (CDIIO) at the FCA and Eugene Goh, Deputy Director at the Monetary Authority of Singapore speak about their corresponding approaches to innovation and business growth in each country, and great to have representatives from the Bank of England, Department for Business and Trade, London Stock Exchange, and the Office for Investment in attendance. In addition, November saw the launch of our non-UK domiciled High Growth FinTech committee, aimed at ensuring global FinTechs continue to have the support they need to increase scale and investment in the UK. November closed out with one of my favorite events of the year, our third annual “CEO Forum”, which convenes the CEOs of our High Growth members together to discuss the unique challenges of building and sustaining a Unicorn business. A special thank you to our sponsors and presenters on the day, Teneo, Microsoft, Global Counsel, and the London Stock Exchange.
December saw the launch of our 3rd Pride in FinTech Powerlist, and the launch of applications for our 10th annual Women in FinTech Powerlist. Both sessions were full of energy and positivity but also an underlying urgency to ensure we continue pushing the diversity agenda forward. Thank you to our Pride sponsors Google, Kyndryl, Zilch, Alloy and supporting partner myGwork and to our Women in FinTech 2025 sponsors KPMG, HSBC Innovation Banking, Funding Circle, Zilch and our host Hogan Lovells.
Over the last quarter our Innovate Finance US programme has also picked up pace, as we held a number of private roundtables for our members, including welcoming the incoming Lady Mayor, Dame Susan Langley, in collaboration with the City of London Corporation London & Partners and the Department for Business and Trade, kindly hosted by Encompass Corporation. The discussion focused on the opportunity to further accelerate FDI into the UK on the back of recent announcements and the strong ties between the US and UK governments relating to tech.
Policy
The final quarter of 2025 has been a whirlwind of activity on the policy and advocacy front. We continued to push relentlessly for UK FinTech to be supported and championed in the Autumn Budget, and I was honoured to be invited onto CNBC and on BBC to discuss our main policy priorities. We were pleased to see a number of key wins announced in the Budget by the Chancellor for our sector, including improvements to EMI schemes (the 250 employee cap increasing to 500 and the 10 year exercise limit increasing to 15 years) and a 3 year exemption from stamp duty on shares traded in newly-listed companies on the London Stock Exchange, a proposal that we called for to encourage IPO market liquidity. The government also published a welcome consultation on Entrepreneurship in the UK, and we will be working with our members to feed into this in January. For a full assessment of the Autumn Budget and what it means for our sector, please see here. More still needs to be delivered on to keep up momentum for our sector in 2026 and beyond, and in the coming year we will continue our advocacy to ensure that UK FinTech - a thriving sector of our economy, and one of Government’s most important allies in driving growth across the country - can continue to flourish.
Ahead of the budget, we also saw a key policy win in the form of the official launch of the new scale-up unit in October by the Chancellor. This is something Innovate Finance has been calling for over several years, and is aimed at providing better support for financial services firms as they grow and navigate the regulatory “valley of death” between sandbox and becoming systemically important.
In the recent weeks we have published two key policy thought leadership papers. Our "Challenger Banks - A British Success Story" paper, published in October in partnership with Hogan Lovells, highlights the benefits that challenger banks provide to the UK economy, consumers and business, including but not limited to how challenger banks and FinTech lenders now provide approximately 60% of all SME lending in the UK. Following on from our thought leadership paper, "Artificial Intelligence: Unlocking the potential of UK Financial Services and empowering consumers" which we published in July, in December, in partnership with Google and Oliver Wyman, we contributed to a report titled “AI’s Next Frontier for Financial Services Leaders” delving into what the future waves of AI will be and what they mean for FinTechs and consumers alike.
On AI, we welcomed the FCA's launch of a new live AI testing service, designed to help companies deploy safe and responsible AI solutions. In December, we also held a roundtable where members were able to share regulatory blockers to the adoption of AI with senior officials from the FCA, ICO, the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, HM Treasury and the Digital REgulatory Co-operation Forum who were all in attendance. The session was aimed at delivering tangible recommendations that regulators and government can take forward.
On digital and cryptoassets, we have been actively engaged across industry to push for faster clarity and momentum. We submitted responses to FCA CP25/25, addressing Chapters 6 & 7 on Consumer Duty and FOS application to crypto activities in October 2025, and Chapters 1-5 on general regulated cryptoasset activities in November 2025. Alongside this, we held a roundtable discussion on the Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) design phase with the Bank of England CBDC team and members in November.. Members heard about the Bank’s Digital Pound Lab and their plans for product strategy, alias service and interoperability. We also welcomed the announcement from HM Treasury earlier this week confirming the timeline to establish a comprehensive regulatory framework for cryptoassets, thus delivering the legal clarity and certainty that the industry has long called for. I was honoured to attend a reception held on the same day as this announcement, with the Rt Hon Rachel Reeves, Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Lucy Rigby MP, Economic Secretary to the Treasury, at 11 Downing Street to celebrate the UK cryptoasset sector.
On payments more broadly, in November we held a roundtable discussion with Laura Mountford, Deputy Director of Payments and FinTech at HM Treasury and Ali Moussavi, Head of Payments Strategy at the Bank of England to discuss the recently published Retail Payments Infrastructure Strategy. Our newly launched Alternative Payment Methods Roundtable has already become an important quarterly forum for leaders in non-card payments - from real-time payments and wallets to digital money - to explore shared challenges and industry-wide developments. We have also regularly convened members with an interest in Commercial Variable Recurring Payments ahead of key meetings with policymakers to ensure information can be shared in advance and the voice of FinTech is unified and strong.
On safeguarding for payment and e-money firms, the FCA previously issued a consultation paper, CP24/20 on safeguarding, proposing onerous requirements upon firms such as the account structures/timescales they operate to and introducing new audit requirements. Following significant lobbying from Innovate Finance and other trade associations, which included roundtables, calls and written submissions, the FCA published their Policy Statement, PS 25/12 which took on-board much of our asks. This included a de minimus for the audit requirement, scrapping the need for statutory trusts and allowing reconciliation to take place on the next working day, rather than on weekends and bank holidays.
On the independent review of the APP fraud mandatory reimbursement regime, the PSR and FCA have appointed Frontier Economics to lead the independent review of the authorised push payment (APP) fraud mandatory reimbursement regime. This is something we previously called for, and Innovate Finance have been appointed as members of the independent review’s Advisory Group. Innovate Finance is one of three trade associations in the group. Our position as members of this Advisory Group provides us with the opportunity to ensure that Frontier Economics accounts for the views of the diverse FinTech ecosystem as they design and conduct the independent review. This will also allow us to update and discuss issues with our members in the first instance.
On open finance and smart data, we continue to advance our work on the future of Open Banking and Open Finance, as the FCA are developing their plans - with a roadmap due to be published before March 2026. We are actively advocating for the rapid extension of Open Banking to Open Finance to foster competition in retail banking, underpinned by free and secure access to financial data for third-party providers, and we continue to work closely with the Open Finance team at the FCA as they build out the framework and future entity needed to deliver it.
In October we held the first RegTech Strategy Group meeting in partnership with the City of London Corporation and EY, building on our RegTech UK initiative. This group focuses on financial crime compliance and Digital ID, aiming to position RegTech as a core element of the UK Government’s Financial Services Competitiveness and Growth Strategy. On Digital ID, in December I was pleased to join on behalf of our members a roundtable discussion on the Government’s plans for Digital ID with the Rt Hon Darren Jones MP, Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister, and Baroness Minouche Shafik.
In November 2025, we submitted a comprehensive response to the Business and Trade Committee's consultation on their "Priorities for 2026". Our submission emphasised the importance of maintaining a proportionate prudential framework for challenger banks to unlock SME finance and highlighted how Smart Data is essential for realising the productivity gains from AI across financial services
In December, we held our final FinTech Strategy Group meeting of 2025. The meeting included guest speaker Sarah Breeden, Deputy Governor for Financial Stability at the Bank of England, who updated members on the Bank’s work and discussed the National Payments Infrastructure Strategy and the systemic stablecoin regulatory framework.
Looking ahead
We are gearing up for an exciting 2026! January will see us hosting a roundtable discussion for our high growth and Unicorn Council members with the Lady Mayor, to discuss her priorities for the coming year.
On January 22nd we will also be hosting a panel discussion on Capital Investment in UK FinTech in 2025: Insights and Trends in partnership with the City of London Corporation, discussing the latest investment data in global and UK FinTech, as we release our 2025 FinTech Investment Landscape report.
We are also kicking off a new and refreshed programme in 2026 catered specifically to early stage and scaling up FinTech firms, which will begin with an opportunity to meet directly with the FCA. More information to come on this soon!
Our FinTech Parliamentary Drinks will take place in February 2026, supported by our partner Starling Bank.
And in the US, we will once again be co-hosting our annual FinTech New Year’s Reception on 14 January 2026 in collaboration with the Department for Business and Trade at the Consul-General’s Residence in New York.
Finally, we are already preparing for the 12th annual edition of our Innovate Finance Global Summit, IFGS 2026, taking place on Tuesday 21 April, and UK FinTech Week! Do secure your member tickets here, and please reach out if you are interested in sponsorship or speaking engagements.
Thank you
As we close out the end of the year, I would like to express my gratitude to the amazing Innovate Finance team and Board, who I have the pleasure and joy of working with.
On behalf of all of us at Innovate Finance, I would like to say a special “thank you” to all of our members for your continued support throughout the year. You inspire us every day, and it is truly our privilege to be able to represent you and serve as your voice. May you have a wonderful, restful holiday season with your family and friends, and we look forward to seeing you in the new year!
Warmest regards,
Janine Hirt
CEO, Innovate Finance
