United Kingdom, experimentation
The FCA regulatory sandbox
The United Kingdom's financial regulator built the first regulatory sandbox in 2016, and by the end of 2022 had accepted 168 firms and products to test with real customers under supervision.
168 firms, firms and products accepted for testing since launch, 2022. Financial Conduct Authority, Innovation Hub market insights, retrieved 2026-08-27.
The move, and what it needed
The regulator wrote a bounded testing regime: a firm without full authorisation can trial a product on real customers for a fixed period, with disclosure requirements and an exit plan, while the regulator watches from inside.
Preconditions
- A single conduct regulator with statutory room to waive its own rules
- A fintech sector dense enough to fill cohorts
- Political cover for a regulator explicitly helping firms it will later police
Where it travelled: The sandbox is Britain's most copied regulatory export, and several dozen jurisdictions now run one. Most copies keep the name and drop the supervisory intensity that makes it work.
Limits: The count is the regulator reporting on its own programme, and acceptance is not success: the FCA does not publish how many tests led to authorisation, funding or a product that survived. One hundred and sixty-eight firms over seven years is small next to the sector, so the number evidences that the mechanism runs, not that it moves the industry.
This record describes what United Kingdom delivered. It is linked to Regulatory sandbox activity because no comparable dataset measures that capability. It does not affect the score or confidence.
More from United Kingdom
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Sure Start children's centres, and their erosion
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