Moody’s hosts Innovation Finance leadership event: The Kalifa Review, five years on

It has been five years since the Kalifa Review of UK FinTech laid out a vision to secure the UK’s status as a world-leading fintech hub.

To mark this milestone, Innovation Finance organized a leadership event hosted by Moody’s bringing together senior industry leaders, policymakers, and FinTech innovators to reflect on progress and the road ahead.

The evening opened with welcoming remarks from Moody’s Ross Elliot, setting the stage for a discussion around innovation, financial inclusion, and long-term competitiveness.

“The UK is today widely recognized as one of the world’s most dynamic FinTech hubs, and Moody’s is proud to back that ambition – by bringing our data, analytics and anti-financial crime solutions to help UK fintechs scale, respond to evolving regulatory expectations, and pursue sustainable growth opportunities in global markets,” says Elliot.

Sir Ron Kalifa then delivered an energizing keynote, outlining a clear and ambitious roadmap to sustain the UK’s global position in FinTech. “We are not coasting on legacy, we are competing. Leadership is not a trophy you put on a shelf; it’s a position you defend every day. We risk becoming the country that invented open banking and then watched others commercialize it,” he cautions, underlining both the UK’s achievements and the urgency of execution.

Kalifa also warned that digital ID, widely regarded as a foundational piece of infrastructure for a modern financial ecosystem, remains narrow and slow in its application, observing “...it is, in many ways, as if we have laid the rail track and hesitated to run the trains on it.” In the global tech race, he stresses, “hesitation is expensive”, suggesting the need for coordinated action between government, regulators, financial institutions, and technology providers to unlock the next phase of growth.

A central theme of the discussion was the evolution from open banking to open finance. Open finance, often described as open banking’s next phase, could see firms use APIs to share banking data across a much broader range of services, such as mortgages and loans, and to offer products and services from external organizations.

But as Kalifa notes, the roadmap for open finance, “once the next chapter” of open banking, is “still waiting to land”, even as countries such as Brazil and India move ahead. This gap between infrastructure and implementation highlights the scale of opportunity and the urgency for the UK to convert policy ambition into delivery at pace.

Many of the Kalifa Review’s original recommendations are being translated into tangible outcomes to drive impact across everyday financial services and support sustainable business growth.

The event delivered clear commercial momentum. Across the room, exchanges developed on growth opportunities in SME financing and lending, alongside demand for faster, more accessible financial services, where Moody’s solutions are positioned to add strategic value.

A unifying theme from the evening was that FinTech remains a powerful enabler of SME finance, financial inclusion, and broader economic resilience. With continued collaboration between regulators, financial institutions, investors, and innovators, the UK is well-positioned to further strengthen its global position in responsible, innovation-led finance and accelerate the transition from open banking to open finance.

Moody’s is proud to support this ongoing journey, helping customers translate infrastructure into impact, opportunity into informed decisions, and recommendations into action.