Bank of England Reveals Start-ups in Its Fintech Accelerator

The Bank of England has revealed the start-ups it will be partnering with in its fintech accelerator program. The announcement was made at the Web Summit in Lisbon on Wednesday, by the bank’s Chief Operating Officer, Charlotte Hogg. She revealed that the three main areas of interest by the BoE were data analytics, cybersecurity and distributed ledgers. She reported that “Just over the past six months we have met or researched over 130 startups, participated in around 25 conferences, and held roundtables with more than 80 organisations. In listening and learning, we are able to begin forming a judgement about the impact of these technologies.” The Bank of England is the first central bank in the world to launch its own fintech accelerator.

“A recent addition to the Fintech Accelerator is a POC [proof of concept] with BMLL Technologies that uses a machine learning platform, applied to historic limit order book data, to spot anomalies and facilitate the use of new tools in our analytical capabilities. A second new POC, with Enforcd, uses an analytic platform designed specifically to share public information on regulatory enforcement action,” she continued. “The Bank’s twin focus has been on protecting the critical national infrastructures we provide, and working with other authorities to encourage financial sector firms to improve their own cyber defences. Fintech tools designed to identify, protect, detect and respond to cyber threats have therefore been of keen interest to us,” she said. In her speech, she disclosed that the bank’s operations were evaluated by one of the start-ups, BMLL, as a means of testing their resilience to cyber-attacks or vulnerabilities. This critical information will then be spread throughout the system to enable other banks perform optimally.