Technology is a key part of FSCS’s plans to improve the experience for customers

FSCS has made good progress over the last year, building our inhouse capabilities in order to handle more claims internally; increasing our use of technology to make our processes more efficient and cost effective, and boosting our readiness capabilities to ensure that we are fit for the future. This work behind the scenes will help us deliver an even higher quality service for customers and provide the best value for the levy payers who fund us.

During the year we worked with the PRA and Bank of England on a project to enable electronic payments to be made to customers if a bank or building society was to fail. This involved setting up a payments portal as an alternative to sending a cheque in the post for eligible firm failures, speeding up the process. The work represents an important contribution towards ensuring financial stability in the UK, as it aims to minimise the disruption caused by insolvency to deposit holders, who need to be able to access the money they have in accounts with a failed firm.

Over the past year, we have used technology to assist with a large number of claims relating to unauthorised introducers. Trying to locate the unauthorised introducers manually would have taken many people many hours but by using Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing to help with the process we were able to quickly identify key information from documents such as PDFs and emails. This has drastically reduced the amount of time a claims handler would have taken to read through documentation manually, improving our customer outcomes.

We have continued to upgrade and optimise our core IT systems, working in partnership with Capgemini and OpenText. This has improved the user experience and we also saved time and money by upgrading the supporting infrastructure at the same time.

Following the successful migration of core IT systems to the cloud last year, we have focused on optimising these services, allowing us to make cost savings and benefit from new features and enhanced security controls.

This year we have also migrated our Security Operations Centre (SOC) to a new provider and this has allowed us to make some improvements to our security controls and take advantage of the most up to date monitoring tools to further enhance FSCS’s security posture.

We continue to look to optimise our ways of working through our people, processes and technology to deliver the best results for our customers in the most cost-efficient way.