Innovation in Professional & Financial Services – Single & Collaborations

Fund details

Your project must focus on one or more of the following:

• legal services
• accountancy and audit
• insurance
• open finance innovation
• financial planning and support for consumers and SMEs
• financial regulatory compliance and financial crime prevention (such as fraud and anti-money laundering)
• payments and transactions

Your project must include the following:

• clear consideration of user experience and design
• consideration of broader, non-technical aspects including ethics, privacy, transparency and regulatory requirements
• consideration of barriers to adoption within these sectors and approaches to addressing them
• quantify how the solution will be exploited

Innovate UK are particularly encouraging applications that:

• are for projects that increase access to services by underserved or excluded communities, individuals, and businesses
• cover more than one sector in scope
• address broad sector-wide needs
• involve collaborations with non-grant-funded professional and financial service providers
• are multidisciplinary and include social science as well as science and engineering

Innovate UK will not fund projects:

• that are quantum technology development (use of existing quantum technologies in the delivery of a service is in scope)
• that focus on climate finance
• that focus on the development of new cryptocurrencies
• that focus on green finance
• that do not meet the competition eligibility or scope
• where other Innovate UK funding support is available and more appropriate

Eligibility

To apply for Innovation in Professional and Financial Services – collaborations, your project must have a total grant funding request between £50k and £500k.

To apply for Innovation in Professional and Financial Services – single applicants, your project must have a total grant funding request between £50k and £200k.

All projects must:

• start by 1 April 2024
• last between 6 and 18 months
• carry out all of its project work in the UK
• intend to exploit the results from or in the UK

To lead a project your organisation must:

• be a UK-registered business of any size
• collaborate with other eligible UK-registered organisations
• if you are a large organisation, include at least one grant claiming micro, small or medium-sized enterprise (SME)

To collaborate with the lead, your organisation must be one of the following UK registered:

• business of any size
• academic institution
• charity
• not for profit
• public sector organisation
• research and technology organisation (RTO)

Funding 

Up to £5 million has been allocated across both strands to fund innovation projects in this competition. Funding will be in the form of a grant.

For feasibility studies and industrial research projects, you could get funding for your eligible project costs of:

• up to 70% if you are a micro or small organisation
• up to 60% if you are a medium-sized organisation
• up to 50% if you are a large organisation

For experimental development projects which are nearer to market, you could get funding for your eligible project costs of:

• up to 45% if you are a micro or small organisation
• up to 35% if you are a medium-sized organisation
• up to 25% if you are a large organisation