FinTech and Financial Services

Readiness

To streamline the process and increase your chances of securing successful FinTech partnerships, it is important to understand what a strong culture and readiness look like across security and risk, governance, compliance, and people.

You need flexibility that suits your goals – you can work with our trusted ecosystem of legal, commercial and regulatory experts and gain access to our established networks and connections to support you in becoming partner-ready.

Proof of concept

Unlocking the full potential of your FinTech solution to enable true growth and value requires a demand-led approach to innovation and partnerships, driven by real industry needs rather than theoretical solutions.

Brought to you in partnership with FinTech-Tables and Co-Labs Global, we invite you to join our partnership ecosystem of Forums across RegTech, FinSec, Data, AI and Climate Collaboration.

Gain access to insights and challenge statements from financial institutions and respond to these challenges through dedicated Hackathon events and dedicated Hackathon as a Service.

Access to this ecosystem and subsequent opportunities will enable you to curate highly relevant, timely and tangible business solutions to the real challenges facing the industry, whilst helping you to achieve a proof of concept for your business innovation and new networks.

Procurement

As a supplier to financial services, you need to ensure that, if selected, your products and solutions will mean the financial institution you are servicing delivers its selected regulatory objectives.

We will support you through any due diligence and procurement processes, and a core focus of our work will be helping you to demonstrate:

• Operational and financial resilience
• Understanding of the regulatory requirements underpinning solutions and tools
• Robust operational capacity and planned resilience to overcome business turbulence
• People-led, ethical approach to business conduct
• Provision of data to substantiate that trust through explainability and transparency.

Adoption

Once you have your tech solution, you’ll want to scale it and accelerate adoption. By aligning your solution with industry challenges and providing access to our trusted partner ecosystem, we will support you in going beyond proof of concept to achieve full commercialisation at scale.

We don’t simply deal with the legal workstream of procurement. We deal with the whole business lifecycle. You will gain access to our partnership network across the financial services ecosystem, a community designed to support growth and create solutions to the challenges facing the industry.

Challenge identification

We don’t just handle the legal workstream during procurement. We will support you through the whole lifecycle.  We often also partner with others to give our clients a commercial edge. 

Our trusted industry experts will help you define specific challenges, and in turn, you’ll gain access to our established networks so that you’re able to define a roadmap of future challenges, identify solutions, and create the architecture to make your business successful for the long term.

Problem statements

Defining specific problem statements relating to your firm and identifying industry challenges requires stakeholder engagement across multiple business functions, which we will help you facilitate.

Depending on how you want to approach it, we can work with our ecosystem of RegTech, FinTech, Climate and Security experts to define problem statements across a range of financial services disciplines and to design the parameters required for successful implementation.

Alternatively, you can work with our team to create problem statements and identify solutions exclusively tailored to your own business requirements.

Readiness

Successfully adopting new technology and data-driven solutions requires the right foundations.

If you want to form FinTech partnerships, you need to consider steps such as project planning, data management, governance, technical design and internal collaboration. When these elements are aligned, partnerships are far more likely to succeed, and our team is here for you at every step.

We work alongside financial services organisations to help them become partner-ready, and we will also support your internal teams in preparing for technology partnerships, enabling more effective collaboration and a smoother procurement process.

By putting the right processes and frameworks in place, we help you engage with potential suppliers with confidence and increase the likelihood that new technology can be implemented and adopted across your business.

Learn and collaborate through our Hackathon Series

Clients also have the opportunity to observe or participate in our invitation-only Hackathon series, which brings together financial services leaders from across our network. These sessions are designed in consultation with industry experts and focus on practical ways to accelerate FinTech adoption.

Participants work together to explore common challenges, including:

• Data preparation and management
• Supplier assessment and approval processes
• Internal collaboration
• Operational resilience
• Governance, risk and compliance

Supplier integration and management

Moving from procurement to successful deployment is often one of the biggest challenges for financial institutions. Implementing new technology requires more than technical integration, it depends on strong governance and the right operational processes which will ensure you can deliver the solutions you need and at scale.

We are there to guide and support you through this transition, making sure you’re watertight on all aspects including:

• Security and data privacy
• Business continuity and operational resilience
• AI integration and emerging technologies
• Governance, risk and compliance.

Procurement processes

If you procure services from technology suppliers, it’s important to be clear about what will be delivered to you and how the solution will fit within your existing infrastructure. You also need to understand how it aligns with regulatory requirements.

We will support you through any procurement or due diligence processes to ensure that suppliers can deliver the right solution tailored to your business, while also demonstrating that you have the required governance and processes in place to support a successful partnership going forward.

This typically includes ensuring there are clear plans in place for:

• Operational and financial resilience
• Meeting relevant regulatory requirements
• Transitioning from procurement to operational delivery
• Managing disruption or business change
• Providing the data and transparency needed to build trust between partners

Our team works with you and our delivery partners to support pre-procurement preparation and planning. Through tailored guidance and our unique sector insight, we help you demonstrate readiness and streamline the due diligence process.

We also support commercial negotiation and validation, helping reduce procurement delays and enabling organisations to move more quickly from supplier selection to implementation and commercialisation.

While we often work closely with FinTech suppliers, we recognise the significant investment financial institutions make in their procurement functions. That’s why we collaborate across both sides of the process, helping businesses work together effectively and support the smooth onboarding of FinTech solutions.

People and culture

Your people are ambassadors for your business and its culture, and we know that financial systems integration requires regulatory compliance, internal alignment with ethics standards, and the timely achievement of commercial objectives. 

Through our employment law services, we can support all HR related matters.

AI integration

You need to understand how adopting AI will benefit your business and how you can leverage it to drive real value at scale. We can help you identify how it can support your:

• data preparation
• data privacy
• regulatory uncertainty
• ethical and reputational concerns
• governance
• risk and security issues, and
• decision-making around the development and deployment of tools.

As firms increasingly utilise AI across their business functions – from robo-advisors to fraud detection and management reporting to risk analytics – they face a complex and rapidly evolving legal landscape, from the UK’s non-statutory cross-sector framework to the EU AI Act. While regulatory requirements vary across jurisdictions, the overall direction of travel is towards greater accountability, risk-tiering and sector-specific compliance. 

We support financial institutions in deriving value at scale, providing a framework for development and deployment that mitigates risks, ensures regulatory compliance, and supports the achievement of commercial objectives.

We also know you need flexibility, and to support that, you can work directly with our ecosystem of legal experts and AI consultants to tackle any challenge related to AI readiness and implementation. 

Attend one of our AI Hackathons, or work with our partner network to design your own bespoke Hackathon dedicated to the integration of AI within your own business.