Original Coverage & Source Attribution: thefintechtimes.com
Anna Wallace has spent more than two decades where regulation, policy and financial innovation meet. At the Financial Conduct Authority she led the world’s first regulatory sandbox, she later worked on financial inclusion at the Gates Foundation, and she is now chief executive of the Centre for Finance, Innovation and Technology (CFIT).
CFIT was set up after the 2021 Kalifa Review of UK Fintech to bring industry, regulators, government and technologists together on problems no single organisation can solve alone. Its coalitions have covered Open Finance, Digital Company ID, SME access to finance, Open Property and, most recently, Supported Payments.
In this In Profile, Anna Wallace, CEO at CFIT, discusses moving good ideas out of pilots and into the market, the cross-sector sandbox that came too early, and the trust questions raised by agentic payments.
Tell us more about your company and its purpose
The Centre for Finance, Innovation and Technology (CFIT) was established following the 2021 Kalifa Review of UK Fintech to bring together the organisations needed to tackle systemic challenges that no single part of the market can solve alone.
As a neutral convener, we create time-bound coalitions spanning financial services, technology, government, regulators, standards bodies and other relevant parts of the ecosystem. But our role goes beyond convening stakeholders or producing recommendations.
Our coalitions are designed to move from identifying a shared challenge to developing, building and testing practical solutions, including prototypes and minimum viable products, alongside the trust, governance, legal and policy frameworks needed to support their adoption.
We’ve applied that model to Open Finance, Digital Company ID, SME access to finance, Open Property and, most recently, financial inclusion through Supported Payments.
Ultimately, it’s about helping turn good ideas into practical change. By testing solutions with real market participants and generating evidence about what works, we can give industry and Government greater confidence that new approaches are not only technically possible, but trusted, commercially viable and capable of being implemented at scale.
What are some of your recent achievements you’d like to highlight?
We’ve made significant progress over the past year across several different challenges.
Our Digital Company ID Coalition developed an MVP enabling effective data exchange between SMEs, identity data providers and banks, which was accepted into the Financial Conduct Authority’s Regulatory Sandbox.
Our SME Access to Finance Coalition tested two financial health tools, a Funding Health Checker and Small Business Coach, and identified changes that could potentially unlock around £5 billion in additional SME lending.
Building on our first Coalition on Open Finance, we also published our Open Property Roadmap, providing a blueprint for applying Smart Data principles beyond financial services to help digitise the homebuying process. We’re now moving that work from roadmap to implementation, bringing together organisations from across the property ecosystem to develop and test practical solutions.
Most recently, in partnership with Project Nemo and Her Majesty Queen Máxima of the Netherlands, we launched our fifth national Coalition, focused initially on developing a Supported Payments framework. The aim is to help people who need assistance managing their finances make everyday payments safely while retaining greater independence and control.
How did you get into the fintech industry?
I had a relatively conventional route into fintech. I studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics at university and had always been interested in financial services, particularly how it can be transformed to make it work better for people.
That led me to the FCA, where I became Head of Innovation and led the world’s first regulatory sandbox, as well as work to establish new approaches to cross-border regulatory collaboration. I also commissioned the first Bank of England and FCA survey into machine learning in financial services in 2019.
After nine transformative years at the FCA, I joined the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as a Senior Programme Officer, working on financial inclusion.
Now I’m in my first CEO role at CFIT, which gives me an opportunity to bring together those experiences across finance, technology, regulation, innovation and inclusion to help unlock growth and tackle challenges across a range of industries.
What’s the best thing about working in the fintech industry?
For me, it’s the ability to use financial innovation to unlock change across so many different parts of the economy. Fintech isn’t only about financial services: we’re increasingly seeing its principles and technologies applied to areas such as property, energy and retail.
It’s also one of those industries where technical innovation and human impact come together very directly. Whether it’s changing how somebody makes a payment, helping a small business access finance or making it easier to buy a home, the technology can have a tangible effect on people’s everyday lives.
And it never really stops. There are always new ideas, technologies and challenges emerging. That’s what makes it such an exciting industry to work in.
What frustrates you most about the fintech industry?
We have no shortage of innovation, but we can still be too slow at getting good ideas out of pilots and into the market at scale.
Often that’s because the organisations needed to make something work (banks, technology providers, government, regulators and others) are operating in different parts of the system. Even where everyone agrees on the opportunity, issues such as standards, governance, liability or commercial incentives can prevent progress.
We won’t solve genuinely systemic challenges if everyone works independently. That’s particularly important as areas such as AI and tokenisation develop rapidly and international competition intensifies.
It’s one of the reasons CFIT exists. Our role is to create a neutral environment where those different organisations can collaborate, test solutions and generate the evidence needed to give the market confidence to move from innovation to adoption.
How have your previous roles influenced your career?
I’ve been lucky enough to look at innovation through three very different lenses: government, regulation and investment.
Government taught me to think about impact at scale: what needs to change across a whole system, rather than for one organisation. At the FCA, I learnt that regulation can be an enabler of innovation, but also that you have to understand risk, consumer outcomes and what makes change possible in practice. And working as an investor at the Gates Foundation gave me another perspective again: being really disciplined about where you put resources, what will genuinely move the dial and how you measure impact.
Those different lenses have shaped how I approach CFIT today. I’m always interested in the innovation itself, but equally in the system around it: what Government needs, what regulators need, what makes the commercial case stack up and, ultimately, whether it will make a meaningful difference to people and businesses.
What’s the best mistake you’ve ever made?
Probably being too early on an idea.
At the FCA in 2019, I led work exploring a cross-sector regulatory sandbox, essentially asking whether businesses developing innovations that crossed regulatory boundaries should have a way of working with multiple regulators together.
It didn’t really take off. I think the market, and probably the regulatory system, wasn’t quite ready for it.
But the problem we identified was real. Today, the Digital Regulation Cooperation Forum is bringing regulators together around technologies and issues that cut across traditional boundaries, and at CFIT we repeatedly see innovations, whether AI, digital identity or Smart Data, that don’t fit neatly within one regulator’s remit.
So the mistake wasn’t identifying the problem. It was probably underestimating how long systems take to become ready for an idea.
It’s taught me not to confuse “not now” with “not right”. Sometimes you need to keep hold of an idea until the conditions catch up with it.
What has the future got in store for your company?
We’re always looking at where collaboration can unlock the next wave of progress.
A particular focus is on areas where there is already significant innovation, but where systemic barriers are preventing that innovation from moving beyond individual pilots or products and reaching scale. That could include agentic commerce, tokenisation, wealthtech infrastructure or applying Smart Data principles to sectors such as energy and transport.
Our previous Coalitions have shown what a coordinated approach can achieve. Increasingly, our focus is not simply on identifying opportunities or producing recommendations, but on helping industry move from alignment to implementation: developing, building and testing practical solutions and creating the evidence needed for adoption.
There is a significant prize if we can get that right: faster adoption, lower system costs, better outcomes for consumers and businesses, and ultimately a more competitive and innovative UK economy.
What are the next key talking points or challenges for your industry as a whole?
Fraud will remain a major priority, particularly as AI makes fraud more sophisticated and scalable. Deepfakes, synthetic identities and increasingly automated transactions all create new challenges around knowing who, or increasingly what, you are dealing with. Trusted digital identity will therefore become even more important. That’s something we’ve already been exploring through our Digital Company ID work, but the challenge will continue to evolve.
The other area I’m particularly interested in is agentic payments. We’re moving from AI that helps people make decisions towards AI agents that can potentially act and transact on their behalf. That creates enormous opportunities, but also some fundamental questions: how do you identify and authenticate an AI agent? How does a consumer delegate authority to it? Who is liable when something goes wrong? And how do we make sure different agents, institutions and payment systems can interact safely?
The Government’s Financial Services AI Champions, Harriet Rees and Dr Rohit Dhawan, identified this as a priority in their recent AI Adoption Plan. They recommended an industry-led trust framework for agentic payments built around legal and liability frameworks, Know Your Agent protocols, and authentication and governance, with a neutral organisation such as CFIT potentially helping to convene the ecosystem.
That is exactly the kind of systemic challenge where collaboration matters. No bank, technology company or regulator can resolve those questions alone. CFIT can potentially bring together financial institutions, AI companies, payments providers, identity specialists, Government and regulators to develop and test common approaches. The opportunity for the UK is not simply to adopt agentic payments quickly, but to help establish the trusted infrastructure that allows them to scale safely.
The Government has accepted the AI Champions’ recommendations for Government and said it will work with regulators and industry on next steps, so this is likely to become a particularly important area of discussion for the sector.
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Rowen Brooks is an AI staff writer at Disrupts Media, the publisher of The Fintech Times, The Biotech Times, The Datatech Times and Disrupts. She reports across all four titles, covering financial technology, biotechnology, data and the wider field of emerging technology. Her work spans news, interviews, commentary round-ups and explainers, with a focus on how new technology is built, funded and adopted, and what it means for the businesses and people using it. She can be reached at [email protected].
