Innovation in Professional & Financial Services R2 Collaborations (UK)

Innovate UK, part of UK Research and Innovation, will invest up to £5 million in innovation projects. The aim of this will be to advance the Professional and Financial Services sectors by supporting them in the creation and adoption of digital approaches and new digitally supported services.

Your project must focus on one or more of the following:

• legal services
• accountancy and audit
• insurance
• open finance innovation
• financial planning and support for consumers and SME’s
• financial regulatory compliance and financial crime prevention (such as fraud and anti-money laundering)
• payments and transactions

Your project must include the following:

• clear consideration of user experience and design
• consideration of broader, non-technical aspects including ethics, privacy, transparency and regulatory requirements
• consideration of barriers to adoption within these sectors and approaches to address them
• quantify how the solution will be exploited

Your project must address innovation in the relevant areas.

Your proposal must show how you will help these sectors:

• to deliver better products and services
• increase access to these services
• make these services more effective for their customers.

Specific Theme 

They are particularly encouraging applications that:

• are for projects that increase access to the services by underserved or excluded communities, individuals, and businesses
• cover more than one sector in scope
• address broad sector wide needs
• involve collaborations with non-grant funded professional and financial service providers
• are multidisciplinary and include social science as well as science and engineering.

Funding Information

• Your project’s total grant funding request must be between £50,000 and £500,000.
• Up to £5 million has been allocated across both strands to fund innovation projects in this competition. Funding will be in the form of a grant.
• If your organisation’s work on the project is commercial or economic, your funding request must not exceed the limits below. These limits apply even if your organisation normally acts non-economically but for the purpose of this project will be undertaking commercial or economic activity.
• For feasibility studies and industrial research projects, you could get funding for your eligible project costs of:
  • up to 70% if you are a micro or small organisation
  • up to 60% if you are a medium sized organisation
  • up to 50% if you are a large organisation
• For experimental development projects which are nearer to market, you could get funding for your eligible project costs of:
  • up to 45% if you are a micro or small organisation
  • up to 35% if you are a medium sized organisation
  • up to 25% if you are a large organization.

Who can apply?

• Lead organisation
  • To lead a project your organisation must:
    • be a UK registered business of any size
    • collaborate with other eligible UK registered organisations
    • if you are a large organisation, include at least one grant claiming micro, small or medium-sized enterprise (SME)
• Project team
  • To collaborate with the lead, your organisation must be one of the following UK registered:
    • business of any size
    • academic institution
    • charity
    • not for profit
    • public sector organisation
    • research and technology organisation (RTO)
  • Each partner organisation must be invited into the Innovation Funding Service by the lead to collaborate on a project. Once partners have accepted the invitation, they will be asked to login or to create an account in the Innovation Funding Service. They are responsible for entering their own project costs in the application.
  • To be an eligible collaboration, the lead and at least one other organisation must apply for funding when entering their costs and completing their Project Impact questions in the application.

For more information, visit Innovate UK.