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CFIT is ‘shaking up business models’ with UK government backing

The Center for Financial Innovation and Technology received further government backing in April

Karl Flinders
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Published: 24 Jun 2026 14:45

After finishing off coalitions focused on open finance, digital ID and small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) access to finance, the Center for Financial Innovation and Technology (CFIT) is now entering the second phase of its open property coalition.

The government wants to transform the archaic homebuying and selling process, which costs the economy nearly £1bn a year. CFIT is tasked with bringing together the public and private sector organisations required to make this happen successfully.

Through a roadmap, CFIT and the open property coalition are attempting to transform the home buying and selling sector, and such is the potential transformational impact, the sector is preparing for a “scary” shake-up.

“One surveyor told us, ‘this is quite scary’,” CFIT CEO Anna Wallace told Computer Weekly. “This is because it’s about shaking up a system and business models that have existed for a very long time.”

She said there are some really “stark facts” around property. “It takes 22 weeks to buy a house and one in three purchases fall through before completion,” said Wallace. “Consumers feel they are at the centre of this, and they are constantly having to share their information.”

This, CFIT’s latest coalition, is now entering its second phase after working with the coalition to identify a consensus on what it can do and map this out. Part of this involved identifying the data sets that were being used by the market and data clusters, which are reusable collections of data which could be used for various purposes. “We’re beginning to identify data attributes that are most used across the buying and selling process,” said Wallace.

Phase two has now begun. CFIT said: “This will now proceed with the discovery phase, prototyping and implementation. This will explore interoperability models, governance frameworks, liability structures and smart data-enabled transaction flows.”

Government appointment

The organisation was set up following a recommendation in the 2021 government-commissioned Kalifa report on UK fintech, which was put together by former Worldpay CEO Ron Kalifa.

CFIT was set up following a recommendation in the 2021 Kalifa report, put together on request of the government by former Worldpay CEO Ron Kalifa. Its task is to support the scaling if financial innovation and fintech.

Wallace told Computer Weekly: “

CFIT was set up following a recommendation in the 2021 Kalifa report, put together on request of the government by former Worldpay CEO Ron Kalifa. Its task is to support the scaling if financial innovation and fintech.

“CFIT’s job is really to look to convert big policy ambitions around financial innovation into prototypes that can be scaled,” said Wallace.

 

She described it as a “neutral space where the public and private sectors can work together to create coalitions to support problem solving and the identification of opportunities.”

“CFIT brings together government, industry, regulators and technology platforms,” she added. “We are not a permanent market actor, but we are here for a specific intervention.”

The government recently awarded CFIT a further £1m, which will see it through to March 2027, while NatWest confirmed further investment.

Wallace is no stranger to fintech and its regulation. She spent 10 years at the Financial Conduct Authority. During that period, one of her achievements was to set up the finance regulator’s innovation hub, the regulatory sandbox. She then moved on to the Gates Foundation to help them with a digital financial inclusion strategy.

Today she leads a “lean machine” at CFIT. “There are about 10 of us,” said Wallace. The CFIT also has “quite a strong board”, she added, because it is a recipient of public funding.

But the coalitions it sets up allow it to punch above its weight and give it the resources to carry out complex projects. It also receives pro-bono support from coalition partners in legal and professional services, banking, and fintech, she said.

CFIT identifies the most appropriate partners for its various projects. “While the component parts are all the same, the various actors may be different,” said Wallace.

The first coalition was all about open finance, the second one looked at company digital ID, and the third SME access to finance. “Now we’re into open property,” she said.

New challenge

For CFIT, it was a brand-new group. “We’ve been very focused on services and tech in the fintech world; this was bringing a whole new ecosystem together for the purposes of thinking about smart data,” said Wallace.

“It was really exciting for us,” she said. “It was a logical next step, how we could bring open finance data, personal ID data and property data together. And how can it be shared to support a more efficient home buying process.

“For phase two, we are going to look to develop a minimum viable product which will serve the purpose of supporting this more efficient home buying process,” said Wallace.

The two key areas that have received the most support in the open property coalition, according to the CEO, are improvements to underwriting loans and milestone tracking.

“How can we make it more effective? How can we make it easier to get a loan underwritten?” she said, adding that many transactions fail quite late on in the process because information surfaces about properties.

“So how can we bring that up to the front? It’s actually more about the reordering of when information is shared,” added Wallace.

On milestone tracking, she said consumers and all participants need a much clearer and single view of where they are in the process of home buying.

“These are the kinds of things that we’re looking at in terms of developing this minimum viable product,” added Wallace. “This would be something that we will pilot with some participants. That would involve the bank, it would involve a conveyancer. Where we can show that this information can be shared securely, in an interoperable way that saves the consumer and engenders trust as well.”

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She stressed that it is not just about the tech and about showing that the tech can work. “We understand that for something to be scaled, there needs to be a clear understanding of trust and governance. As part of that, as well as there being a minimal viable product that individual companies can look to in terms of developing their own business case, we know that there will be work to be done in developing a trust and governance framework for this.”

There will always be hurdles to clear when changing processes from a bygone age. Earlier this month, for example, a property sector initiative to introduce a digital identity scheme is being scrapped due to concerns over UK government policy and a lack of consumer benefits.

Organisers of the scheme have informed Whitehall departments backing the plan, along with regulators and industry bodies, that they are withdrawing support for the implementation of a standard digital ID into the property sector.

The MyIdentity initiative aimed to allow home buyers and sellers to prove their identity once, instead of having to do so multiple times. This information would then be shared with other parties, such as estate agents, mortgage providers, solicitors and conveyancers, within a government-approved digital identity trust framework.

But CFIT said a Digital Property ID could have a role to play – but that it “requires industry and government collaboration to test its potential”.

“One of the core concepts emerging from CFIT’s Open Property Coalition is indeed the Digital Property ID,” the CFIT told Computer Weekly. “Rather than a static document, this would be a dynamic, reusable framework of verified information linked to a Unique Property Reference Number. It could include ownership and title data, material information, planning history, risk indicators, transaction status and consent records.”

It said the opportunity goes further and is part of a broader concept – a Smart Data Pack. This would combine the verified property data, digital identity credentials and relevant financial information into a secure, reusable set of trusted data that can move across the transaction chain.

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