Icons denoting CCAF's digital finance programme for regulators.

Regulatory knowledge exchange

14 February 2022

The article at a glance

Pilot programme for digital finance regulators and policymakers supported by Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation launched at the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance at Cambridge Judge Business School.

Pilot programme for digital finance regulators and policymakers supported by Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation launched at the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance at Cambridge Judge Business School.

The Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance (CCAF) at the Cambridge Judge Business School, University of Cambridge today announced the launch of a pilot programme to develop a peer-led and community-driven digital platform for digital finance regulators and policymakers with support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

The Regulator Knowledge Exchange (RKE) seeks to provide regulators and supervisors working in the area of digital financial services with a trusted digital platform to collaborate and coordinate more closely. The platform is envisaged to facilitate peer-learning, knowledge exchange, policy transfer, and collective problem-solving among the global regulatory community on key issues.

The Regulator Knowledge Exchange was initially created to support the growing alumni community of the Cambridge FinTech and Regulatory Innovation Programme (CFTRI), which has successfully trained more than 1,200 financial regulators and central bankers from more than 300 regulatory authorities in over 140 jurisdictions.

Peer-learning and knowledge exchange are hallmarks of the CFTRI, which aims to increase the capacity of financial regulators and supervisors to regulate fintech activities and more effectively develop regulatory innovation initiatives. The RKE is an extension of the classroom and provides a trusted and user-friendly digital platform for regulators to learn, discuss, engage, collaborate and coordinate. 

The pilot, funded by the Gates Foundation with additional support from the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, will test the feasibility and scalability of the Regulator Knowledge Exchange to serve the needs of the wider regulatory community beyond the graduates of the CFTRI.

During the pilot programme, the CCAF will test and learn from different channels and mechanisms to interact, engage, and grow the RKE regulator community. The RKE hosts regulator member profiles, peer-to-peer communication channels, fintech and regulatory innovation related news feed, a state-of-art knowledge repository with relevant regulatory and policy documents, academic papers, datasets and e-books as well a series of live events and webinars.

The RKE also offers the regulatory community access to an array of enabling digital tools that the CCAF has been developing for instance, the RegSimple, which harnesses natural language processing and machine learning technologies to allow regulators to benchmark regulatory frameworks regionally and globally. In time, the CCAF also plans to engage technical assistance (TA) providers to offer targeted one-to-many technical assistance digitally via the RKE.

The RKE is already live with more than 600 regulators from 90 jurisdictions signed up.

“Regulators are facing common challenges in their response to the speed at which fintech is developing and its increasing complexity,” says Dr Robert Wardrop, the Director and Co-Founder of the CCAF. “The support provided by the Gates Foundation enables us to take the RKE to the next stage of development and to widen its reach to help regulators, particularly in Low to Middle Income Countries (LMICs), to keep pace with, and take advantage of, technological innovation.”

The Regulator Knowledge Exchange is one of several CCAF initiatives aimed at supporting financial regulators in dealing with an accelerated growth in the use of fintech globally. The CCAF also runs in-person and online capacity building activities, bringing together financial regulators, development agencies and University researchers specialising in the digital transformation of the financial sector.