Question to the HM Treasury:

To ask Mr Chancellor of the Exchequer, what steps his Department has taken to boost the growth of the financial technology industry.

As part of our long term economic plan, the Government is committed to supporting the continued growth of the Financial Technology (FinTech) sector. The Government has taken a number of steps to achieve this, including:

• Creating a new Payments Systems Regulator (PSR), which will ensure that smaller banks and alternative providers of finance – including FinTechs – can access payment systems in a fair and transparent way, and thereby contributing to a fairer and more competitive payments industry. The PSR will open its doors on 1 April this year.

• Committing to additional funding of £100m to the British Business Bank’s Investment Programme – including funding for FinTech.

• Launching the GO-Science’s Blackett Review on FinTech Futures, which looks ahead 10 years to the future and identify what the technologies, enablers and barriers are that will shape the future of the UK FinTech sector.

• Naming the big banks that will have to share credit data, and refer on SMEs they reject for finance – helping alternative finance providers, including FinTech firms, to lend more effectively;

• Supporting the development of the peer-to-peer lending and crowdfunding market: consulting on ISA eligibility for crowdfunded debt securities; announcing we will review EU regulations standing in the way of P2P institutional lending; and creating a bespoke regulatory framework for P2P.

Most recently at budget 2015, we announced a further package of measures to build on the government’s wide-reaching programme of reform to drive competition in banking and FinTech, including announcing that:

• The Government intends to apply anti-money laundering regulation to digital currency exchanges in the UK, launch a new research initiative into digital currency technology, with £10 million additional funding, and work with the British Standards Institution and the digital currency industry to develop voluntary standards for consumer protection.

• Gocompare will launch the first personal current account comparison tool making use of customers’ bank midata releases on 26 March 2015.

• The Government will work with the banks and FinTech firms to develop an open API (Application Programming Interface) standard for banks, by the end of the year.

• the Financial Conduct Authority’s (FCA) ‘Project Innovate’ will work with HMT and the Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) to investigate the feasibility of developing a regulatory ‘sandbox’ for financial services innovators

• Innovate Finance has agreed to deliver its FinTech regional strategy through a series of local partnerships; the first partnership has already been established in Leeds, and further partnerships will be established in Manchester and Edinburgh by April, and in Newcastle, Bristol and other centres before the end of the year.