Future Finance 4 All

Future Finance 4 All, led by the University of Bristol, will take a mission led approach to accelerate innovation adoption in Mid-Tier organisations and small and medium-sized enterprises (SME), in the UK Financial Services (FS) Sector across the four UK home nations. The focus of this partnership is to enhance the sector's productivity and global competitiveness. To achieve this, we will develop an understanding, from a social science perspective, of the drivers and obstacles to innovation uptake in this target group. We will then put in place a mission-oriented approach that leverages both leading social science research and experience in supporting SME innovation adoption to inform the development of an innovation adoption accelerator. The accelerator will be delivered over three phases, Phase 1-Local, Phase 2-Regional, Phase 3-National. Working with partners, including policy makers, industry and community organisations, the accelerator will help us overcome obstacles and drive innovation adoption across UK regional FS clusters. This will overcome the market failures that are holding back innovation uptake, unlocking productivity and levelling benefits across the UK regions.
The accelerator will also enable us to also tackle societal challenges around responsible access and uptake of FS for underserved communities, individuals and companies. This will lead to the development of new bespoke products and services, which the Mid-Tier organisations and SMEs, which are the accelerator's focus, could then exploit. This potential 'market making opportunity' for new FS product and service innovation could have relevance in both UK and global markets that share similar inclusion challenges.
The innovation accelerator activities will facilitate networking and partnerships between social science experts and the financial services community through innovator pathway fellows', drawn from high potential early career researchers. Building on our partnership's research base and expertise supporting innovation clusters, we will then deliver a rolling collaborative challenge programme that brings together industry, academic and social insights to explore and address barriers to innovation adoption. Through a rolling programme and digital platform the challenge programme outputs will inform the development of specific interventions for FS firms and stakeholders to enable them to gain the skills and capabilities to innovate. To maximise engagement and efficiency the innovation skill & training Programme will be delivered in scalable hybrid format and include peer-to-peer learning.
Foundational to the Programme will be a focus on inclusive growth and diversifying the talent pipeline, addressing key findings from the 2022 UoB-led FinTech report, Kalifa Review, cross-sector surveys (EY and Innovate Finance, 2022), and sector-wide consultations.
The accelerator will support the creation of habit-forming behaviour change through the exploitation of the Quadruple Helix model that brings universities, underserved communities, industry (including the sector's charities and not for profit players) and government to:
Better connect key actors across the FS sector to overcome fragmentations, this will build new skills and capabilities within the partners and the project team.
Ensure that the voices of underserved communities, individuals and companies are heard and reflected in the tangible delivery of new, or enhanced, FS products and services.
Stimulate and support industry to prioritise innovation investment.
Provide pathways, and practical solutions, to enable innovation uptake, including digital innovation, that enhances the productivity of mid-tier FS organisations and SMEs. A key project output will the measurement of these productive gains and their impact on the organisations that we support, and how this will contribute towards UK regional levelling up by unlocking a broad spectrum of organisational, economic and social benefits