Innovation Insights
The Innovation Hub collaborates with industry, academia, policymakers, and fellow regulators to understand and analyse the potential opportunities and potential risks that technologies can pose to consumers and markets.
The evolution and enhancement of our Innovation Hub and launch of our first Innovation Sandbox Programme in December 2024 are key tools in helping the Bank understand and engage with innovation, be better informed and to better articulate our expectations to firms.
These tools also allow us to collect data and generate valuable insights into the rapidly developing innovation ecosystem in Ireland and beyond.
Innovation Insights will harness observations, emerging trends, and practical learnings captured that we think would be useful to share more widely through the Innovation capability we have built including the Innovation Hub, the Innovation Sandbox Programme, and our broader engagement with firms and the wider ecosystem that has been built.
Innovation Insights are not regulatory guidance, policy statements, or formal positions of the Central Bank and should not be read or interpreted as such.
The content reflects our observations and analysis from innovation engagement activity and does not set out supervisory expectations or create any obligations for regulated firms. Firms’ are responsible for assessing their own compliance with applicable legal and regulatory requirements.
Since its launch in 2018, the Innovation Hub has supported a diverse range of firms, from incumbents to FinTech start-ups, and this early engagement has helped firms better understand our regulatory expectations and helped us to better understand innovation
as it happens in the financial system.
Key facts:
- 7 years of engagement with innovative firms
- Over 600+ engagements through our Innovation facilities, including 26 firms and products accepted into our Innovation Sandbox Programmes
- We support firms of all sizes and at any stage of development, provided they meet our eligibility criteria. This includes:
- start-ups, scale-ups and incumbents
- firms that are regulated and those seeking to be regulated, and technology providers
- Irish and international firms serving Irish consumers
2024 Key Highlights:
- 71 new enquiries, a 10% increase from 2023
- 1 in 5 firms who engaged through the Hub in 2024 are using AI as their enabling technology
- 31% of enquiries from Regtech firms
- 54% of enquiries came from scaling or established firms
- 44% of firms enquiring about the authorisation process
Innovation Hub Reports
Innovation Hub Report 2024
Innovation Hub Report 2023
Innovation Hub Report 2022
Innovation Hub Report 2021
Innovation Hub Report 2020
Innovation Hub Report 2019
Innovation Hub Report 2018
Emerging Insights identifies critical and emerging trends affecting financial services over the medium and long term and translates these into tangible insights to help inform our regulatory thinking across policy and strategy.
Over the course of 2026 we will be publishing a number of these insights, driven by engagement with firms and the innovation ecosystem through our Innovation Hub and Sandbox Programme