Ask a small business owner how long it takes to secure a loan, and the answer is often months of paperwork ending in a rejection that has little to do with the firm's prospects — and everything to do with a system that can't see it clearly. That gap, and the fraud that exploits similar blind spots, sits at the centre of the UK's fintech challenge.

The country that pioneered open banking and regulatory sandboxes now risks losing its edge, not for want of ideas but because those ideas stall inside silos. Anna Wallace, chief executive of the Centre for Finance, Innovation and Technology (CFIT) — the body set up after the 2021 Kalifa Review to attack exactly these structural bottlenecks — makes the case that the next leap forward is organisational, not technical.

Still the leader, but the crown is contested

Wallace frames the UK's standing as strong but no longer guaranteed, with rivals advancing quickly in AI and tokenisation.

The Kalifa Review, she notes, was commissioned around precisely this question of how the UK holds its position. Home to world-class institutions and talent, the country nonetheless has to keep pace with competitors making real headway. Doing so, in her view, hinges on confidence — particularly investor confidence that the innovations being funded can actually scale. CFIT's role, she says, is to build that confidence through a more coordinated ecosystem and standardised policy, so promising ideas translate into real-world adoption rather than stalling.

Silos are the real brake on progress

Asked what holds the sector back most, Wallace points squarely at fragmentation.

Regulators, financial institutions, technology providers and government too often try to solve industry-wide problems in isolation, she argues — an approach that hinders progress rather than advancing it. CFIT exists to bridge those divides, convening stakeholders around delivery and implementation instead of discussion alone. The greater power, in her telling, comes from collaboration: sharing ideas and infrastructure and building common standards that let multiple players compete on top of the same foundations.

Digital Company IDs as anti-fraud plumbing

On fraud, Wallace treats verified corporate identity as essential infrastructure rather than an optional extra.

Criminal networks have grown more organised and sophisticated, she says, while firms have spent billions tackling the problem in isolation. A single, reusable and verified source of corporate identity, by contrast, could give businesses and institutions the confidence to fight economic crime while cutting compliance costs and strengthening the UK's competitiveness. The demand is real, not theoretical: research across more than 1,000 UK SMEs found that 85% would be willing to pay for a Digital Company ID. The building blocks already exist; what's needed next, she argues, is a more preventative framework with standardised protocols to drive adoption across sectors.

Unlocking the SMEs that lenders can't see

The financing gap for small firms, Wallace suggests, is a visibility problem more than a capital one.

SMEs remain underserved thanks to fragmented data, limited insight into their own financial health, and inefficient lending processes. The average lending transaction drags on for six months, and more than 90% of applications referred under the current Mandatory Bank Referral Scheme are turned down — not for lack of available capital, but for lack of a clear view of the borrower. CFIT's answer is digital financial-health tooling. Testing a Funding Health Checker and a Small Business Coach with ecosystem partners, it found that better access to appropriate funding and greater awareness of the options could unlock £5bn (US$6.8bn) in SME credit, freeing firms to focus on scaling.

Smart Data breaks out of banking

Open Finance, Wallace contends, has proved a point that now needs extending across the wider economy.

Consent-driven data sharing helped make the UK a fintech leader by showing it could transform markets and improve outcomes at scale. The next question is how those same Smart Data principles apply beyond financial services — to property, energy, transport and health. She points to recent government reforms to simplify homebuying, much of which aligns with CFIT's Open Property Roadmap and its focus on cutting delays and costs, digitising paperwork and preventing collapsed sales. It is, she says, the first major Smart Data initiative beyond finance and arguably the strongest test yet of how the model scales — provided cross-sector collaboration can match the momentum.

The most underrated opportunity in fintech isn't a new product or technology — it's coordination. Too many promising ideas die between proof-of-concept and market-wide adoption. — Anna Wallace, CEO of CFIT

Designing for everyone, not just the tech-savvy

Inclusion, in Wallace's account, is a design requirement rather than an afterthought.

Fintech's value, she argues, lies less in new technologies themselves than in scaling them so they genuinely benefit consumers — which requires input from outside the sector, including government, policymakers and nonprofits, to work out how innovations can serve a broad range of people rather than only the digitally adept. That same theme runs through her answer on the trend the industry underrates: coordination. Areas such as agentic commerce, SME data frameworks, digitised capital-markets infrastructure and financial-crime utilities all show promise but keep falling apart past the pilot stage, undone by silos, misaligned incentives and regulatory uncertainty. Closing that gap, she says, is precisely what CFIT was built to do — with a significant return in a more competitive UK fintech landscape.