The firms are just two of the 29 forming the fourth cohort, or wave of firms allowed to test their digital products, services or business model in a compliance ‘safe space with live consumers, built-in safeguards and regulatory supervision.
to test its products in a safe space with live consumers and built-in safeguards, regulatory consultation and supervision and potentially easier access to finance.
Dashly describes itself as a fully autonomous, ‘always-on’ mortgage advice platform that continuously tracks and compares a borrower’s existing mortgage, alerting customers the moment it pays to switch.
A spokesperson said far from simply flagging the end of deal term, the software ‘continuously calculates all the collective variables,’ from property value to dropping a loan to value tier, for example, that in many cases will show it pays to switch before the ERC period is over — in some cases with a year or even two years left.
Mortgage Kart bills itself as an automated-advice offering to help customers pick the most suitable mortgage given their needs and circumstances.
NatWest is also listed as testing a governance model based on distributed ledger technology, which records asset transactions in several places at once and enables organisations to work collaboratively on developing and running decentralised applications.
The listing said: “The model codifies society rules in smart contracts on a blockchain creating a digital mutual.”
NatWest will open source the code after successful testing, it said.
Christopher Woolard, executive director of strategy and competition at the FCA, said: “I am pleased to say that this is the largest sandbox cohort to date with a record number of applicants meeting our eligibility criteria. Cohort 4 has seen a large increase in the number of firms testing wholesale propositions including firms that are aiming to increase the efficiency of the capital-raising process. Alongside these we can see significant use of distributed ledger technology (DLT), some experimentation with cryptoassets which will help inform our policy work and propositions aimed at helping lower income consumers.”
The FCA received 69 applications to cohort four of the regulatory sandbox, an increase on the number of applications to cohort three. Barclays and Nationwide were a part of the third cohort, which entered the sandbox in December last year.
