Northern Ireland showcases its credentials as a Global Hub for Fintech Innovation
In the competitive world of fintech, Northern Ireland is a leading global hub, earning worldwide recognition for its fintech ecosystem. The region's strategic blend of home-grown innovators and major international financial services companies has positioned us at the forefront of the industry's recent growth.
Acording to FT fDi Markets 2023, Northern Ireland is second in the world for fintech inward investment projects, with Belfast ranking as the top city globally. Moreover within the UK, Northern Ireland enjoys the highest concentration of fintech employment, with one in five individuals contributing to the dynamic intersection of financial services and technology.
The city of Belfast has also emerged as a focal point in Northern Ireland’s ascent as it has solidified its position among the top three global fintech locations of the future, ranked only behind the much larger cities of London and Singapore. This accolade, bestowed by both the fDi Intelligence Fintech Locations of the Future 2019/20 and the NI Fintech Ecosystem Report 2020, underscores the region's sustained commitment to innovation and its readiness to shape the future of financial technology.
Delving into the thriving fintech landscape on the ground, Northern Ireland has cultivated expertise across diverse sectors, including trading, next-gen payment solutions, funds, wealthtech, regtech, insuretech, and cyber security. The region's trailblazing initiatives extend to disruptive technologies such as AI, data analytics, and ESG analytics, positioning it as a hub of innovation and creativity.
The global regtech market is projected to soar from $12.82 billion in 2020 to $60 billion by 2023, and this is reflected in Northern Ireland with regtech being one of the fastest-growing sub-sectors in Northern Ireland‘s fintech sector.
In fact, a recent KPMG report identified that, in relative terms, there are twice the number of people directly employed in regtech in Belfast compared to London. This underscores the region's pivotal role in shaping the regulatory technology landscape.
Showcasing, this success on the Invest Northern Ireland stand, at the recent Fintech Talents Festival in London were some of Northern Ireland’s leading fintech companies, including:
Home-grown success story FinTrU who are collaborating with tier one investment banks worldwide. FinTrU offers regulatory, legal, compliance, and Know Your Customer services. The fintech giant recently announced a £20 million new office investment in the region by 2027.
Another indigenous firm, fscom, is a leading specialist consulting firm providing governance, risk and compliance solutions to financial services institutions in the UK and Ireland. Only last month it achieved three major industry accolades at the Compliance Register Platinum Awards in London including Best Consultancy Firm.
Datactics helps more than 100 clients worldwide including Tier 1 investment banks, retail banks, insurers, wealth management firms and UK government departments get their data in order and quickly respond to new standards. Ranked in Gartner’s Data Quality Magic Quadrant, it assists Chief Data Officers and data governance staff to identify and fix broken data. This improved information is used in value-adding business functions like regulatory reporting, for example BCBS 239, and predictive analytics.
Failures in digital infrastructure account for billions of additional costs to business every year and Uptime Labs believes current methods are outdated. Its AI-driven incident drill platform has proven to cut downtime by 20 percent, saving a typical financial services company some £400,000 annually. It can also resolve incidents with half the number of engineers, help reduce the onboarding time for engineers from 48 weeks to just four weeks and reduce attrition rates by 10 per cent.
Similarly, Regtick is rethinking how companies manage compliance. It reduces costs and improves control and collaboration by driving efficiencies in, and improving control over, regulatory and compliance processes.
Meanwhile, pytilia specialises in cloud native applications, devops, scalable systems and security by design. What this means is that security is at the heart of its development lifecycle from requirements capture and design to implementation, test and deployment.
And, in a world where it is increasingly vital to demonstrate compliance, Amazon Web Services® Select Consulting Partner, cyber security company Vertical Structure helps companies achieve certification to international standards including ISO27001, Cyber Essentials and CAIQ.
These are just a few of Northern Ireland’s leading fintech companies. So if you missed us at the Fintech Talents Festival, why not check out how Northern Ireland’s fintech sector is supporting financial services companies globally with the technology it needs, or how our expertise on the ground, together with the support of Invest NI can enable your fintech company to expand.
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