Finance chief Charlotte Crosswell has been instrumental in bringing open banking to the UK. With six million people and 600,000 SMEs benefiting from greater interoperability between online banking services, she is now charged with overseeing the new Centre for Finance, Innovation and Technology (CFIT) as its first chair.
Crosswell, who led the Open Banking Implementation Entity (OBIE), and is a former president of Nasdaq, said it will be an “exciting” 12 months ahead for the new organisation, which aims to bring growth to the fintech sector.
She said: “We’ve seen some fantastic innovation through the regional clusters and their memberships, but the next stage is about trying to identify some of the blocks on innovation, and how we can solve them. The important thing is that it will look at the most challenging issues that are out there in financial services, and fintech today, and tries to address them by bringing people together in what we call a coalition model.
“CFIT will be a partnership, collaborating with and amplifying the voices that don’t always get heard as loudly, whether that’s to try and solve access to talent and investment, scaling a business or ensuring we don’t have regional bias when it comes to setting up a fintech.”