OneID® at FCA RegTech Forum – Supporting Innovation and Growth

We attended the FCA's RegTech Forum—Supporting Innovation and Growth on 30 April 2025. The event brought together industry leaders, innovators, and policymakers to explore the evolving role of regulatory technology (RegTech) in financial services. It was an excellent opportunity to listen to leaders and innovators and share what we had learned from participating in a couple of FCA projects. 

Key highlights from the event:

• Ian Phoenix shared the FCA’s innovation agenda

• Janine Hirt (Innovate Finance) & Paul Worthington (Stripe) explored RegTech’s potential for UK growth

• Colin Payne led a great panel on unlocking RegTech opportunities

• Matt Lowe walked us through the FCA’s innovation support (regulatory sandbox, tech sprints, digital sandbox)

• Tatiana Botskina of Deriskly and I shared what we learned from the FCA innovation support.

OneID® learnings from FCA Sandboxes

We have completed projects in two sandboxes. Here's what we have learnt during the process. 

1. 2022 Regulatory sandbox - proving the product's applicability in AML use cases

• Proved that a bank-based digital ID can be used for KYC/AML, with no regulatory issues raised
• Obtained certification from our auditor as an electronic ID provider for AML use cases

2. 2023-24 Digital sandbox - Using APIs to prevent APP investment fraud

• OneID® demonstrated verification of individuals via a bank-based ID, with data matching of records in the FCA and Companies House registries, e.g. for permissions or directorships, to enable people to prove who they are and their permissions for offering investment services.
• The Open Banking governance and technical protocols could be reused to enable data sharing from other 'trust registries' of data. This would fix gaps in the data matching process, removing impersonation risk.

Three things the Government and Regulators could do to support the adoption of digital ID

1) New FCA API to enable digital verification of data ownership; e.g. Companies House and FCA could provide an API for a data subject to share registry data to digitally prove directorships/FCA permissions (reducing impersonation risk)

2) HM Treasury to update AML guidance to recognise that the UK now has a digital ID framework - Digital Identity and  Attributes Trust Framework (DIATF), to encourage adoption of digital ID. A statement from HMT or FCA on digital ID from DIATF-certified providers would help to remove cultural barriers to adoption (and move us beyond 'we need a gas bill'). 

3) Support the path to adoption of digital ID in the National Payments Vision to secure payments; include digital ID data in Faster Payments enhancements to both deliver innovation and prevent APP fraud at the same time (enable digital ID for both parties in a payment). Whilst Faster Payments is in the garage getting an upgraded engine and go-faster stripes, let's also give it the turbo-boost of digital ID!

If you'd like to know more about how OneID® can help your financial services with their RegTech, book in some time to chat to us today!