Financial Services Commission Opens Recruitment for D-Testbed Project Participants... Collaboration Opportunities with Financial Companies

Recruitment of Participants from the 4th to 24th of This Month
Data Enhancement Based on Last Year's Pilot Project Results and Establishment of a New Collaboration Model with Financial Companies

[Asia Economy Reporter Song Hwajeong] The Financial Services Commission is promoting the D-Testbed project, which allows startups and prospective entrepreneurs to verify innovative fintech technologies and ideas. It supports data from over 2,200 items of financial and non-financial companies and provides opportunities to collaborate with financial companies.

On the 3rd, the Financial Services Commission announced that the 2022 D-Testbed project will be conducted in three participation categories: free proposal type, business-linked type, and challenge task type, recruiting and selecting a total of 40 participants.

The D-Testbed project provides a testing environment based on financial data for startups and prospective entrepreneurs to verify the effectiveness and innovativeness of innovative fintech technologies and ideas. It was first implemented in the UK in 2020 under the name "Digital Sandbox" and, after its success, was benchmarked domestically with a pilot project conducted last year.

Following last year’s pilot project, there were criticisms regarding the lack of support for data provision and business linkage after testing, and opinions emerged that participation and interest from financial companies are necessary to secure data and support business linkage. Accordingly, this year, improvements and supplements were made to address last year’s issues, including data reinforcement, establishment of collaboration models with financial companies, and strengthening consulting for business linkage.

First, combined data consisting of over 2,200 items from financial-related institutions such as the Credit Information Center and the Korea Financial Telecommunications & Clearings Institute, as well as data held by a total of 10 financial and non-financial companies, will be supported. Non-financial data such as telecommunications data will be reinforced, and datasets combining data from different institutions will be provided. In addition, pseudonymized and anonymized information, which has less information loss compared to statistical data, will be provided. A Financial Services Commission official stated, "Through this, it will be possible to analyze overall financial and non-financial activity information centered on an individual, and it is expected to be used for general purposes to advance fintech business ideas."

A new collaboration process will be introduced where tests are conducted jointly with the financial company that proposed the theme task. The business-linked type and challenge task type are newly established collaboration processes, and participants who choose these can select one of the detailed tasks proposed by each proposing institution and submit related ideas.

Financial companies and related institutions that proposed the tasks will support necessary data, analysis tools, mentoring, etc., during the testing process, and the Financial Services Commission will also support matching for common follow-up research and business partnerships with financial companies for outstanding cases. The Financial Services Commission expects that the newly established collaboration process will be useful not only for creating collaboration cases between financial companies and fintech but also as a platform for public and private sectors to jointly seek solutions to financial sector issues.

Post- and linkage support such as providing feasibility evaluation reports will also be strengthened. During the test, pools of experts from various fields will be formed to provide mentoring, and a "feasibility evaluation report" containing an objective assessment of business potential will be provided. The feasibility evaluation report focuses on the validity and feasibility of the idea performed during the test period, with an objective evaluation conducted by a private expert group issuing the report.

Anyone, including fintech companies, individuals (Korean nationals), and teams (university research labs and hobby groups, etc.) who want to directly test their ideas can participate in the D-Testbed. Applications can be submitted online through the D-Testbed website until the 24th. After selecting participants, from the 26th of next month until December 11th, participants can implement and verify their ideas through the D-Testbed remote analysis environment for 11 weeks. After the mock test of participants’ ideas is completed, outstanding cases will be selected and awarded commendations. After the project ends, continuous support for the commercialization of ideas will be provided through various support projects of the Korea Fintech Support Center and the financial regulatory sandbox system.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.