What are the Fintech Onboarding Guidelines?

Tech Nation’s Fintech Delivery Panel, with the UK’s 5 biggest banks and input from UK fintech startups, have created essential, definitive onboarding guidelines for fintechs and other SMEs looking to work with large financial institutions.

Engaging with large financial institutions can seem like a daunting endeavour for a starting or scaling company. This document explains what is expected from companies looking to work with the big banks. It goes into important aspects of the interaction like the qualification process, things to consider in your market positioning, and other key points to bear in mind when talking to a large regulated entity, such as due diligence on your third-party technology providers.

Who should use them?

These guidelines, the first of their kind in the UK, were built with mainly fintech companies as a target audience but can be used by any company wanting to engage with the sponsoring banks. It’s our hope that other banks in the UK and abroad will follow suit and also adopt these guidelines. (Note however: this isn’t an Open Banking or PSD2 guide.)

Why is this useful?

Unless you or your team have done it before, engaging with a large regulated financial institution can be tricky. Until now, there wasn’t much to help entrepreneurs prepare for and navigate the journey. This document aims to give you as much clarity as possible around what will be expected when you step into the doors of any of these bank.

What’s next?

The aim of the Fintech Delivery Panel’s working group is to facilitate the interactions between banks and fintech companies as much as possible. For the next iteration of the guidelines, we will be working on a toolkit containing more resources for entrepreneurs. Sign up to our newsletter below to keep up to date with all our activity.