Barefoot Innovation Podcast

I'm thrilled to share today's episode, because it's a window into how a major financial regulator is reinventing itself in real time — and what that could mean for the rest of the world. My guests are Colin Payne, Head of Innovation at the UK's Financial Conduct Authority, and Matt Lowe, Manager of the FCA's Innovation Lab.

Long-time listeners know the FCA holds a special place in this podcast's history. They invented the regulatory sandbox almost a decade ago and triggered a global wave of imitation — by my count, more than 90 regulators around the world now run something inspired by their original model. I've had many FCA leaders and alumni on the show over the years, and our team at AIR includes several alums, including Nick Cook, the FCA’s former innovation head.  It was wonderful to sit down with Colin and Matt to hear what comes next.

What struck me most in this conversation is the FCA's deliberate move from being "tech neutral" to being "tech positive." Most financial regulators say they're neutral about technology — meaning they don't endorse any particular vendor or tool — but neutrality can quietly slide into indifference about whether industry adopts good technology at all. The FCA is pushing past that. Colin describes it as leaning in: being bullish about technology as a force for growth and consumer benefit — especially as AI matures — while still holding financial firms to the same principles-based, outcomes-focused standards. It's a subtle shift, but I think it will matter enormously.

Another theme I love is what Matt and Colin call breaking the silos. Silo-breaking is kind of an obsession for my colleagues and me at AIR — we can’t modernize the financial regulatory system without vastly more collaboration across the ecosystem and much more ability to share information.  The FCA is dismantling silos by fusing innovation, policy, supervision, and authorization into the same workstreams. Their recent stablecoin policy sprint is a great example — the head of crypto policy didn't just sponsor it; she sat in the room for two full days, facilitating sessions and having lunch with the firms whose work she'll later regulate. As Colin puts it, "you couldn't be more frontline if you ever tried." Compress three months of traditional consultation into two days of working side-by-side, and you start to see what real-time, agile policymaking can look like.

Our conversation also digs into the FCA's new AI Lab — the digital sandbox "on steroids," as Matt describes it — built in partnership with NVIDIA, AWS, and others, with synthetic datasets covering tens of thousands of simulated individuals and businesses so firms can actually test frontier-model ideas against realistic data. And Colin offers a tantalizing preview of work on a machine-readable handbook, with the longer-term vision of "policy as code" — rules embedded directly into the systems that have to implement them. If that future plays out, the relationship between regulator and regulated firm changes fundamentally.

Underlying all of this is a question I keep coming back to on this show: how can the regulatory world possibly keep pace with the speed of technological change in finance? Colin and Matt don't claim a single answer, but they offer something better — a working theory, plus a growing body of experiments testing it. I came away energized about what's possible when regulators commit to, as they put it, “moving fast and making things, rather than moving fast and breaking them.

More on Our Guests

Colin Payne

Colin has spent over two decades at the cutting edge of fintech, digital banking, and regulatory innovation in areas like digital assets, DLT, wallets, and faster payments. He has worked with founders, unicorns, central banks, and global regulators to help them grow, adapt, and succeed through collaboration, acceleration, and cross-border partnerships. Today he leads the FCA’s regulatory innovation team, building frameworks and platforms for the next decade of finance by advancing AI, smart data, tokenisation, and sustainable growth. The team aims not just to enable novel business models, but to set a global benchmark for safe, inclusive, and future-ready markets. “The future of financial services isn’t just coming, we’re building it.”

Matt Lowe

Matt Lowe has over eight years’ experience at the intersection of innovation and regulation. At the Financial Conduct Authority, he has spearheaded pioneering initiatives designed to transform how regulators and firms collaborate on emerging technology. These include the FCA’s TechSprint programme, the Digital Sandbox, and the development of the AI Lab.

Most recently, Matt co-led the launch of the AI Lab’s flagship initiative, the Supercharged Sandbox. The Supercharged Sandbox supported a cohort of 22 firms, providing a cutting-edge environment for testing AI applications in financial services. His work reflects a commitment to fostering innovation while ensuring consumer protection and market integrity, helping position the FCA as a global leader in regulatory innovation.

More for Our Listeners

We’ve been incredibly busy at AIR. I’ll link in the show notes to a recently published progress report on our work, and to our newly published playbook for stablecoin policy in Africa. Come to the website for updates on our recent events, including a TechSprint on Fairness by Design with Consumer Reports and the PROTECT initiative with the Inter-American Development Bank and the Center for Financial Inclusion, aimed at countering financial scams in Latin America. Keep an eye out for much more information on our expanding work against financial crime.

We’ve also recently had our team at the 3i Africa conference in Ghana, and recently, Shelley Anderson spoke at Stablecon EMEA on stablecoins in Africa.

Another recent highlight for me was speaking at the American Bankers Association Regulatory Risk and Compliance conference. This big event draws the U.S. leaders of the risk and compliance professions each year. I spoke on AI, in a fireside chat with Raj Date and Konrad Alt, who were incredibly thought provoking. We will be posting that as a podcast episode on Barefoot Innovation, so please watch for it. The other thing that really struck me at the ABA event was that this year, technology, and especially AI, dominated the agenda. The world is changing – fast.

In the fall, both Nat Weber and I will speak at Money 2020 USA (October 21, 2026, Las Vegas, NV).

Here’s a full list of speaking engagements and events.

Thank you for listening! If you enjoyed this episode, please rate us on your favorite podcast platform and share it with colleagues who care about financial services and, by extension, smart financial regulation.