Karsten Wenzlaff, Advisor
August 26th, 2025
FCA | Nikhil Rathi | Apr 20, 2021
HighlightsThanks to many of you participating in this conference, UK fintech has grown successfully in recent years, at the forefront of global innovation.
Its revenue rose to £11bn in 2019 – almost doubling in only four years and accounting for almost 10% of the global total. Already this year, we have seen over $1bn worth of investment into UK fintech.
This revenue growth and investment has been supported by and, in turn encouraged, changes in consumer behaviour.
Seven in ten of us now use the services of at least one fintech company.
More consumers are adopting innovative ways of accessing financial services in the UK than in equivalent markets, for example using finance aggregator services to make it easier to save and manage outgoings.
This success in financial innovation has been enabled by regulatory open-mindedness; a trait not always associated with regulators.
So, why has the FCA taken this lead?
First, Parliament has given us a duty to promote competition.
The challenge for us is the balancing act required by the rider within our competition objective – in the interests of consumers.
The choice created by competitive markets is, in itself, not a social or economic good. It only becomes one when it delivers better or cheaper products, an improved or more tailored service, and pushes incumbents to fight harder to attract and keep their customers. Crucially, consumers must be armed with information they can readily understand to help them make the right choice for them.
In supporting innovation to deliver more competitive markets, another of our objectives is held in balance – that of consumer protection.
Innovation comes with risk. New products and new firms fail. They can take consumers’ money with them. As a result, we, as regulator, need to understand new ideas and stay close to innovative firms.
That is why, less than a year after the FCA was founded, we set up Project Innovate. This recognised that the financial services industry has high costs of entry, and so those wishing to join – with genuinely new ideas that support markets and provide choice to consumers – require additional regulatory support.
We have now supported over 500 highly innovative firms, around a third of those that applied.
137 firms have now also passed through the Sandbox, in which new innovative ideas are safely tested before reaching the market. Of those, over half successfully completed their test. And those tests that did not go as planned provided intelligence about what works and what doesn’t, without risk to consumers or markets.
As a result, there are products now on the market offering new ways to pay, insure and access advice. And to support the wider market, we have tested regtech solutions, for example how to manage the compliance in the issuance of digital assets or deal with anti-money laundering requirements.
This support for innovation has been matched by action to protect consumers and markets, where we believe the consumer or market benefits are few or unclear.
For example, while we can see how useful distributed ledger technology can be - indeed a number of products drawing on it have been through the sandbox - we have made clear our concerns about certain investments in cryptoassets, which rely on DLT.
Last year, we banned the sale of crypto derivatives to retail consumers because the majority lost money, despite significant price increases in the underlying assets.
We also warned that direct investment in cryptoassets is high risk, with few regulatory protections.
We have been blunt. If you invest, you should be able to afford to lose it all.
In last month’s letter of recommendations for the FCA from the Chancellor, the FCA was asked to
“secure the right balance between a financial sector that is globally competitive, works for consumers, and is secure over the long-term.”
As part of this careful balancing act, the Chancellor announced the FCA will be taking forward the Kalifa Review’s recommendation for a Scalebox.
Here, we are drawing on lessons from Project Innovate, which has shown that once authorised, firms continue to need higher levels of support from the regulator and, often, enhanced oversight.
By autumn, we will develop plans to create a regulatory ‘nursery’.
This will create a period of enhanced oversight as those newly authorised firms develop and grow used to their regulatory status.
Currently, firms gain regulatory status and are treated in the same way as a firm with a long track record. The regulatory nursery will keep us in close contact with firms immediately post-authorisation so we can provide support and, where we need to, intervene earlier to steer firms in the right direction.
The National Crowdfunding & Fintech Association (NCFA Canada) is a financial innovation ecosystem that provides education, market intelligence, industry stewardship, networking and funding opportunities and services to thousands of community members and works closely with industry, government, partners and affiliates to create a vibrant and innovative fintech and funding industry in Canada. Decentralized and distributed, NCFA is engaged with global stakeholders and helps incubate projects and investment in fintech, alternative finance, crowdfunding, peer-to-peer finance, payments, digital assets and tokens, blockchain, cryptocurrency, regtech, and insurtech sectors. Join Canada's Fintech & Funding Community today FREE! Or become a contributing member and get perks. For more information, please visit: www.ncfacanada.org
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Forbes | | Apr 14, 2021

The Senate on Wednesday confirmed President Joe Biden's nomination of Gary Gensler, a former Goldman Sachs banker and a forceful commodities regulator under former President Barack Obama, to head up the Securities and Exchange Commission, setting the stage for widespread reform as the agency takes on unprecedented stock-market volatility and booming institutional adoption in the nascent cryptocurrency space.
The Senate confirmed Gensler's appointment Wednesday afternoon in a vote of 53 to 45, placing the 63-year-old academic and former investment banker atop the agency charged with maintaining fair, orderly and efficient markets.
Gensler, who's promised to increase transparency and reduce risk in the market, succeeds former SEC Chair Jay Clayton, an attorney tapped by former President Donald Trump to undo financial regulations that "stifled investment in American companies."
The confirmation comes more than a month after the Senate Banking Committee voted 14 to 10 to advance Gensler's nomination for two terms ending on June 5, 2026.
The Senate only voted to confirm Gensler for the remainder of the term expiring June 5, so it will need to hold another vote for his second term.
Viewed as a leading reformer after the 2008 financial crisis, Gensler opened his nomination hearing in March by touting his five-year stint as chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and cautioning that "when we fail to root out wrongdoing, or to adapt to new technologies, or to really understand novel financial instruments, things can go very wrong."
Crypto regulation under Gensler. In an interview with Forbes last month, SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce acknowledged Gensler will have a "very busy agenda—much of which will have nothing to do with crypto," but she said he's likely to be "sympathetic to the call for regulatory clarity" in the space.
The SEC has long delayed issuing firm regulation targeting digital currencies given its purview over securities (and not currencies), but Gensler—a professor focused on cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology at the MIT Sloan School of Management—will be overseeing the agency as it takes on a slew of bitcoin exchange-traded fund applications and as it investigates Ripple, the firm behind one of the world's largest cryptocurrencies, for the alleged sale of unregistered securities.
“When it comes to enforcement, Mr. Gensler has shown he has the guts to take on bad actors, no matter how big, no matter how powerful they are, and he will hold them accountable,” Senate Banking Chair Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) said Tuesday.
The National Crowdfunding & Fintech Association (NCFA Canada) is a financial innovation ecosystem that provides education, market intelligence, industry stewardship, networking and funding opportunities and services to thousands of community members and works closely with industry, government, partners and affiliates to create a vibrant and innovative fintech and funding industry in Canada. Decentralized and distributed, NCFA is engaged with global stakeholders and helps incubate projects and investment in fintech, alternative finance, crowdfunding, peer-to-peer finance, payments, digital assets and tokens, blockchain, cryptocurrency, regtech, and insurtech sectors. Join Canada's Fintech & Funding Community today FREE! Or become a contributing member and get perks. For more information, please visit: www.ncfacanada.org
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