29 October 2024 — Cambridge SupTech Lab, Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance, Cambridge Judge Business School has selected three vendors to develop financial consumer protection working prototypes as part of its Application Incubation programme. Application Incubation is an accelerator for financial authorities and technology vendors to co-create and deploy suptech applications with funding from donors such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the International Finance Corporation.
The Lab executed competitive bidding via Requests for Proposals for each project and led an expedited yet rigorous vendor selection process to review and score the anonymised bids from a global cohort of applicants. Ultimately, proposals were selected from Winnow Technologies (Winnow), Matellio, and Link Development.
Winnow will be partnering with the Reserve Bank of India to create a market-level suptech working prototype to detect and flag fraudulent fintech apps. The prototype aims to reduce fraudulent activities and enhance the robustness of the fintech ecosystem by alerting supervisors of potentially fraudulent apps. Winnow was selected because of proven ability to scrape data from social media and other public web-based sources and deliver insights using advanced analytics techniques. Winnow also developed a financial consumer protection suite with web scraping and machine learning-based analysis prototypes for Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (the Central Bank of the Philippines) and Securities and Exchange Commissions of the Philippines as part of the Lab’s Application Incubation programme in 2023.
Matellio was selected to work with the Superintendency of Popular and Solidarity Economy in Ecuador (SEPS) in the development of a bi-lingual (English/Spanish) AI chatbot to manage queries from partners, customers and other users related to the supervised financial providers; a case management system to enhance the SEPS’s ability to analyse, respond to, and manage claims and complaints efficiently; and a data analytics tool to generate market conduct risk indicators and alerts.
Link Development will be working with the Central Bank of Egypt to develop an automated complaints monitoring and analytics suptech solution to enhance financial consumer protection and market conduct supervision. The solution will support both Arabic and English languages and will augment supervisory insights needed for data-driven regulation with additional granular consumer complaints data.
The vendors were chosen for their ability to meet the full scope of functional requirements, technical specifications and other criteria outlined in the requests for proposals, including capabilities in the agencies’ local languages and availability for on-site support. A key component of the vendor deliverable is a suptech application that can be maintained by the financial authority, for which the vendors agree to deliver the source code to each financial authority with which they work. The vendors also are required to provide a roadmap for next steps toward live implementation of the working prototype and subsequent phases of the digital transformation journey.
Through the Lab’s Application Incubation programme in 2023, five working prototypes focused on social media scraping and sentiment analysis were developed to support consumer protection for Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (Central Bank of the Philippines) and Securities & Exchange Commissions of the Philippines; Otoritas Jasa Keuangan (Financial Services Authority of Indonesia) and Bank of Ghana; and the Superintendence of Banking, Insurance and Private Pension Funds Administrators of Peru.
Nathalie Lenehan, Technical Programme Manager at the Cambridge SupTech Lab, said, “We are very pleased with the vendors selected to work with the financial authorities that are part of this year’s Application Incubation programme. The financial authorities will receive fully working prototypes for them to determine how to take forward in a live environment, and the vendor solutions will be permanently enhanced with the functionality they develop for the working prototypes. The co-creation of prototypes is a key catalyst to driving the digital transformation of financial supervision and a cornerstone of the Lab’s suptech offering.”
About the Cambridge SupTech Lab
The Cambridge SupTech Lab accelerates the digital transformation of financial supervision and supervisory agencies. The Lab delivers online leadership education, experiential training, research and market intelligence, new analytical frameworks, innovative digital tools, and cutting-edge suptech applications. It drives collaboration across the ecosystem of financial supervision to empower a financial sector that is more sustainable and inclusive. Cambridge SupTech Lab is an initiative of the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance at the University of Cambridge Judge Business School. (www.cambridgesuptechlab.org).
