Update on the Isle of Man Fintech Innovation Challenge (1)

Last November during Digital Isle 2021 we made an important announcement about our intention to launch a Fintech Innovation Challenge in partnership with the Isle of Man Financial Services Authority and Finance Isle of Man. We’re excited to report on the progress we’ve made so far and the next steps we are taking to launch the Challenge.

The Fintech Innovation Challenge is being launched to allow the current Isle of Man business community to be stakeholders in the development of creative, sustainable and technology-based solutions to current issues in the Financial Services sector, and for those stakeholders to support the winning applicant to take their proposition to market. We expect that Fintech Innovation Challenge applicants will introduce innovative offerings and solutions to enable Isle of Man businesses to further grow based on the challenges that the stakeholders identified, and therefore derive the greatest value and benefit for both stakeholders, and the wider Isle of Man business community.
 

The launch of the Challenge is a collaboration between Digital Isle of Man, Finance Isle of Man and the Isle of Man Financial Services Authority (IOMFSA), who are working in conjunction with Deloitte over the next few weeks to frame the opportunity and produce a roadmap to successfully launch the Challenge and find a winning applicant.
 

A key part of our strategy to develop this challenge is to reach out to capture the ecosystem’s perspective and define the scope of the Challenge opportunity in order to produce a clear vision which will underpin the delivery strategy for a successful launch. We conducted a workshop with a group of island stakeholders in March ’22 and the discussion covered a range of high-level themes around how the Challenge should be framed (topics, incentives, marketing among others), with a wide range of perspectives from across the ecosystem captured.

The initial workshop discussions enabled us to narrow the focus of the Challenge, and as a result, it has been identified that for this first year Challenge the focus should be on finding a “foundational” Fintech solution, which can provide practical applications to a maximum number of participants in the ecosystem, whilst requiring no regulatory change.

Given this focus, our next phase in scoping this Challenge involves a deeper-dive into these themes, whilst expanding our scope and additional stakeholders throughout the Isle of Man to capture a wider cross-ecosystem perspective, for which this may be relevant. After these follow-up sessions we will be in a position to better understand the needs of the ecosystem and thus define a problem statement for the Challenge to address. 

If your business is based in the Isle of Man and would like to be involved please contact us here and we will be in touch.

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