News Features

Smart Data Foundry has collaborated with East Renfrewshire Council to introduce a pioneering Cost-of-Living Dashboard. Utilising near-real-time deidentified banking data from NatWest, this dashboard integrates financial well-being indicators with contextual information, aiding the council in comprehending the challenges citizens face during the current cost-of-living crisis.

Smart Data Foundry, in partnership with FinTech Scotland, is excited to announce the launch of a groundbreaking UK Fintech innovation challenge, in collaboration with leading UK banks. Our primary objective is to strengthen the relationships between Financial Institutions and their Small and Medium-sized Enterprise (SME) clients by identifying and supporting innovative solutions.

Pinsent Masons and Smart Data Foundry join forces to discuss the growing use of synthetic data in the financial sector and the associated legal implications of this new and emerging area.

Smart Data Foundry, Sage, and Cebr unveiled their much-anticipated quarterly Small Business Tracker covering the final quarter of 2022. This new report promises to provide unique insights that will transform how we understand the financial health of small businesses in the UK.

We are absolutely thrilled to announce that our esteemed board member, Stephen Ingledew OBE, has joined the Centre for Finance, Innovation, and Technology (CFIT) as an independent non-executive director.

The expansion of open banking across the globe has led to a burst of innovation within financial products, leading to improved customer money management where consumers give access, and consent to their data being used.

Smart Data Foundry and Ozone API have a shared and aligned purpose to inspire financial innovation. The opportunity has never been greater to embrace Open Banking, Open Finance and ultimately Open Data to safely unlock the power of financial data on a global stage.

Open Banking (OB) has been revolutionising credit risk profiling and aiding personalised financial planning around the globe, all through the customer-permissioned release of banking data. This has been allowing accelerated innovation by shortening the time products can be created and making new markets accessible.

Meet aizle, our synthetic data engine. Synthetic data can be used to build a rapid prototype, train an AI model, or run scenarios on the strategic impact of a new initiative.

To make the best decisions, you need the best data. But what if that data doesn’t exist?

Joining Chair Dame Julia Unwin and Chief Executive Officer Frank Gauld, the heavy-weight board is drawn from government, industry and academia, bringing with them significant expertise across data and financial services.

Smart Data Foundry supplies the FCA and PSR TechSprint with leading-edge synthetic data in the fight against Authorised Push Payment Fraud

Our Marketing and Impact Evaluation Intern, Georgina McNamara, discusses her experience working at a FinTech start-up for the summer, from learning more about data science to working with her fellow interns.

A recent collaboration between Smart Data Foundry and the FCA required us to produce bespoke datasets that supported their new Digital Sandbox. Our expertise aided the FCA in building their knowledge of synthetic data, a growing technological product that is predicted to take over the entire AI landscape in as little as five years.

One of Edinburgh Futures Institute PhD Candidates and Smart Data Foundry collaborator Savina Kim has recently written a whitepaper that has a critical call to action to address fairness and bias concerns in algorithm-assisted decision making.

At Smart Data Foundry, our mission is to unlock the power of financial data to help improve people’s lives and to drive and foster innovation that will make fintech a success. To support this, we want to ensure that Open Banking and Open Finance are built inclusively, benefiting all in society. This week’s Queen’s speech seeks to build a new landscape of data sharing, innovation and regulation with Smart Data , that supports our mission to open finance for good.

Welcome, Frank Gauld as Smart Data Foundry’s new CEO. Before moving to NCR in America in 2017, he held high-profile roles at Clydesdale and Yorkshire Bank as CIO for Change and IT Development. Frank will relocate back to Scotland on April 6th to take up the key position.

But algorithmic bias doesn’t just have the potential to affect credit risk; it can affect any technology where algorithms are used.  

One of the other technologies it can affect is digital identity systems.  Bailey Kursar and Savina Kim explore this in this article.

Algorithms are behind many of the most impactful decisions made today by banks, lenders, and credit checking companies. Decisions that will affect how you and your family live your lives. But what is an algorithm?
Put simply, an algorithm is a set of instructions that a computer follows to complete a task.

Members of our Data Science team were recently invited to enter an international synthetic data challenge under our previous name of the Global Open Finance Centre of Excellence (GOFCoE) organised by the United Nations Economic Commission of Europe (UNECE) High Level Group for Modernisation of Official Statistics (HLG-MOS).

A strategic partnership is delivering insights into how the coronavirus pandemic has affected people’s income, spending, and saving. The findings will help shape the economic recovery and future financial support schemes, while keeping customers’ data safe and secure.