FCA partnership creates ‘Supercharged Sandbox’ to accelerate industry’s AI innovation

The FCA has partnered with US-based technology company NVIDIA to launch a “Supercharged Sandbox”, designed to help regulated firms experiment safely with artificial intelligence (AI) and support industry-wide innovation.

In the technology sector, a sandbox refers to a controlled, isolated environment where new software, applications, or code can be tested safely without impacting existing main systems.

The FCA plans that its Supercharged Sandbox, revealed on 9 June 2025, will give financial services firms access to better data, technical expertise and regulatory support, with the overarching ambition of helping to speed up AI led innovation across the sector.

The sandbox takes advantage of NVIDIA accelerated computing and NVIDIA AI Enterprise Software, a cloud native software platform.

Firms looking to experiment or innovate using AI can apply to access the Supercharged Sandbox via the FCA website now, with successful applicants able to use the sandbox fully from October.

The FCA noted that although the sandbox was primarily targeted at businesses which were in ”the discovery and experiment phase with AI”, the platform also has functionality to help ”those further along in development” that are “ready to use AI” already.

Jessica Rusu, chief data, intelligence and information officer at the FCA, said: ”This collaboration will help those that want to test AI ideas, but who lack the capabilities to do so.

”We’ll help firms harness AI to benefit our markets and consumers, while supporting economic growth.”

Innovation commitment 

Jochen Papenbrock, Europe, Middle East and Africa head of financial technology at NVIDIA, added: ”AI is fundamentally reshaping the financial sector by automating processes, enhancing data analysis and improving decision-making, which leads to greater efficiency, accuracy and risk management across a wide range of financial activities.

”The FCA’s Supercharged Sandbox provides firms with a secure environment to explore AI innovations using NVIDIA’s full stack accelerated computing platform, supporting industry-wide growth and efficiency.”