By Sarah Biller, co-founder of FinTech Sandbox and executive director of Vantage Ventures, and Jim Smith FinTech Sandbox Advocate

When we started FinTech Sandbox almost seven years ago, it was to give fintech entrepreneurs a leg up. We’d seen that access to data was a problem — a gating factor — and some of us had lived that reality as entrepreneurs ourselves. One of the greatest impediments to starting a fintech business is the high cost and/or inaccessibility of financial data, including market data, retail banking data, insurance data, and payments data. Without access to deep, quality data, it’s difficult to identify problems to solve and/or test services to the robust standards of financial institutions.

We began by recruiting partners who had data and were willing to make it available for free to well-vetted startups at a point where it was most impactful. To our initial partners, firms like Thomson Reuters, SIX Financial Information, FactSet, Xignite, Tradier, Plaid, and Benzinga, we will be eternally grateful. They shared our vision. Thanks to them and the data providers who followed, we’ve been able to help hundreds of entrepreneurs develop and test their applications more quickly and to a higher quality standard.

We began by offering streamlined access to capital markets and payments data and we have steadily expanded our offerings to include news, regulatory filings, consumer credit and weather data, and more. Today, we have more than 40 data partners working with us to promote entrepreneurship and financial technology innovation globally.

As much as early-stage fintech startups benefit from free, early access to data, data providers and financial institutions can benefit from offering it. It’s a symbiotic relationship that helps each party and ultimately advances the entire financial services industry in the process. FinTech Sandbox isn’t just watching innovation happen — we are fostering it and learning from it.

Five reasons you should consider partnering with FinTech Sandbox:

Competing with more than table stakes: McKinsey estimates the global banking industry will generate upwards of $1 trillion in additional annual value from artificial intelligence over the next five years. Financial institutions and data providers who partner with us discover new, monetizable business ideas from the start-ups that persistently apply new technologies to existing datasets. Startups are sometimes able to point to datasets that are not being fully utilized or properly monetized.
Balancing innovation with regulation: Regulation on both sides of the Atlantic is encouraging greater openness and greater transparency to promote competition and the use of data is at the core of it. As open finance continues to accelerate, the winners will be those firms that actively engage with fintech innovation.
Navigating opportunities in the move to net zero: FinTech Sandbox has expanded its reach to support the unique data needs of sustainable finance start-ups. Our entrepreneurs often discover useful insights when working with difficult data sets, which otherwise can be overlooked. For example, a new fintech may have technology that can aggregate unstructured data in a more timely fashion, normalize it, and draw new conclusions that can ultimately benefit traders and other financial institutions. We’re seeing this today in work being done by startups sifting through data in government filings and company communications for ESG-related insights.
Embedding financial services is happening and at a fast clip: Industries like healthcare, energy and transportation are increasingly partnering with fintech to insert financial services into their products. These efforts are generating new and differentiated datasets that inform new business opportunities for incumbent financial services firms. Partnering with FinTech Sandbox provides access to start-ups who are uniquely positioned to ingest, analyze, and explain these new datasets, and some are becoming niche data providers themselves.
Assessing the promise and perils of new data constructs in a DeFi world: Fintechs can be a bridge between data providers and financial institutions in a future where the adoption of blockchains and programmable money may supplant traditional financial intermediaries. Decentralized finance (DeFi), built on secure distributed ledgers, will necessitate that banks, brokerages, exchanges, insurers, and others manage their risks and their opportunities using new and differentiated data. FinTech Sandbox is on the cutting edge of these emerging technologies and partnering with entrepreneurs, data providers and institutions to explore ways to capture and distribute data in a permissionless, frictionless financial services system of the future.