At the Digital Isle Conference on 10th November 2022, Lyle Wraxall, Chief Executive of Digital Isle of Man, announced the launch of the FinTech Innovation Challenge, a collaboration between Digital Isle of Man, Finance Isle of Man, and supported by the Isle of Man Financial Services Authority and Deloitte assisting.
The Innovation Challenge is part of the Isle of Man’s ambitions to build a secure, vibrant, and sustainable future. It has been developed to give innovative businesses around the world the chance to experience the island’s collaborative financial services sector, and showcase their solutions to core challenges that have been identified across the Isle of Man business community.
The FinTech Innovation Challenge Finale, held at Comis Hotel & Golf Resort on Thursday 29th June, will be a full day conference and expo. All 17 Finalists will pitch their solution on stage to both the judging panel and the wider business community audience. Don’t miss out, REGISTER TO ATTEND.
The Finale provides a fantastic opportunity for sponsoring businesses to put their brand in front of those at the heart of the Island’s digital and finance economy. There are a number of sponsorship options across a range of different budgets to suit a variety of different needs. See the Sponsorship Pack for details of the opportunities that are available.
The FinTech Innovation Challenge is a competition inviting global participants to provide solutions to specific problems in order to support the growth and application of FinTech across the Isle of Man. The Challenge will allow businesses to pursue opportunities to develop within the Isle of Man’s world-leading regulatory environment, as well as encouraging collaboration with local communities to produce sustainable and innovative technologies to solve key challenges facing the financial sector.
For businesses participating in the FinTech Innovation Challenge, this is a unique opportunity to work with government, the regulator and businesses in a leading digital hub, and scale up solutions ready for the global market.
The Challenge aims to deliver three key objectives:
Participants will be able to choose from a selection of two predefined FinTech Innovation Challenges, plus a ‘wildcard’ option.
The management of identities follows a sequence of attributes and complexity as you move from the existing analogue to the digital environment. KYC (Know Your Customer) is a key procedure in financial services on boarding, where a customer’s identity will be checked and verified. We would like to see how a Digital ID/e-KYC solution could be developed to reduce costs, automate processes and ensure data security, whilst complying with AML (Anti-Money Laundering) and KYC regulations.
The solution should consider:
For this challenge we would not expect deliverables to be able to go beyond C, but that should not limit presenting future proposals to build to D.
Risk assessment, profiling and reporting should also be considered.
Fraud prevention and risk management are critical to the success of compliance within financial institutions. This challenge asks for a solution that harnesses the power of technology to streamline and transform regulatory activities for organisations.
With sanction screening being a highly manual process for many financial services providers, how might we leverage the power of technology, machine learning and AI for sanction screening in payments and transactions, so that manual touchpoints can be reduced to a minimum level and identify sanctioned entities and transactions effectively?
It is also worth considering how financial intelligence may be shared between parties to enhance the accuracy of AI without compromising privacy.
Challenge Statement 3 is designed to be a wildcard, and we encourage all eligible FinTechs to define a problem statement that they believe exists in the Isle of Man and propose a technology-based solution to this problem. This can relate to any aspect of the Financial Services Industry.
The FinTech Challenge milestones can be seen below.
Introducing the 17 businesses from across the globe that will make up the very first cohort of the FinTech Innovation Challenge. Click their logos to find out more about the business and its offerings.
To support the FinTech Innovation Challenge, it is important that the local ecosystem plays a range of roles to ensure its success. We invite the local community to take part in the challenge through one of the following roles:
Individuals or companies that want to provide access to space, mentorship and potential financial support. During the program, mentors will share industry insight, experience and provide mentorship to program participants.
Individuals or businesses that support the Final Event and post-event. As the solutions materialise, the challenge audience could become potential customers / investors of the end product.