Smart Data Discovery Challenge winners pave the way for new £750,000 prize launch this summer
Four winners of the Smart Data Discovery Challenge named
- The Department for Business and Trade has awarded four teams a share of £20,000 for Smart Data ideas that could have the greatest impact for individuals and small businesses.
- The winners include a platform for gig workers to gain financial security, tailored grocery optimisation to eat more healthily and cut food waste, an online financial assistant with personalised money saving advice, and a green financing platform to help households transition to net zero.
- Following the success of the Smart Data Discovery Challenge, a new Smart Data Prize will launch in summer 2024 to transform ideas into real-world solutions.
Friday 22 March 2024 (London) – Four innovative winners of the Smart Data Discovery Challenge were named at a pitching event on Thursday evening. Minister for Enterprise, Markets and Small Business, Kevin Hollinrake MP, awarded the teams a share of £20,000 for their ideas on how to use Smart Data to make a difference for people and small businesses.
It paves the way for the launch of a new Smart Data Prize later this summer. Participants will have the opportunity to prototype their Smart Data ideas in a digital sandbox, with the support of grant funding. The strongest entrants will be eligible for a share of up to £750,000.
Kevin Hollinrake, Minister for Enterprise, Markets and Small Business said:
Smart Data has the potential to play a major role for consumers and businesses. We’ve seen it used in Open Banking, and hope other sectors like energy, SME finance and home buying can take advantage of this innovation to help improve their service for their customers. I congratulate today’s winners and look forward to seeing their ideas develop to the next level.
The four Smart Data Discovery Challenge winners are:
- Mealia – Personalised grocery optimisation for health, savings and sustainability – Integrating supermarket data to recommend healthier food alternatives, cost savings, budget-friendly shopping strategies, meals based on purchase data, and more sustainable food choices.
- Rodeo – Smart earnings data for gig workers – Lightning Riders, the team behind the Rodeo app used by more than 15,000 drivers, proposes a Smart Earnings Data scheme to enable gig workers to access and control their earnings data. Millions of gig workers in the UK are paid by dynamic algorithms on platforms like Uber, Deliveroo, Just Eat and Amazon. As ‘independent contractors’ they need to manage their finances and taxes and make informed decisions about who to work for and which jobs to accept. Smart earnings data would unlock new financial tools for drivers and enable gig workers to exercise their market power, improve their financial security and facilitate greater tax compliance.
- Smarter Contracts – Digital financial health check and monitor – An online financial assistant providing consumers with personalised money-saving comparison offers for a wide variety of cross-sector services. Consumers could consent to always-on monitoring of their current products and services in relation to market changes, to check that they are always on the most appropriate product and terms, alerting them to potential savings when available. The entrants believe it could enable millions of UK consumers to save hundreds of pounds annually.
- Smartlayer.ai – personalised home finance products powered by a predictive “HomeHealth Score” - designed in collaboration with a Tier-1 UK bank, the HomeHealth score combines Open Banking data and Smart Energy data with the aim of humanising consumer choice in home finance, energy consumption and CO2 emissions reduction. Smartlayer aims to open up personalised, wallet-sensitive, smart home finance options to the many households currently excluded from green finance.
In October, the Department for Business & Trade, Challenge Works, the Open Data Institute and Smart Data Foundry called on individuals, innovators, entrepreneurs, academia and civil society to share ideas for ambitious and feasible solutions that could harness Smart Data across different sectors of the economy in the future.
Smart Data enables people and small businesses to access and share their data simply and securely with authorised third parties, enabling those third parties to provide them with innovative services. Open banking is an example of smart data in action, underpinning the UK’s fintech success story.
The Smart Data Discovery Challenge encouraged cross-sector use case ideas across the financial services, energy, retail, transport and home buying sectors. It is part of a wider programme of Smart Data-enabling work by government which includes legislation giving greater powers to implement schemes, recent consultations (for example on Open Fuel), and future policy development (e.g. in Energy and Transport) planned for the coming year.
Chris Gorst, Challenges Director, Challenge Works – a Nesta enterprise, said:
Smart data is a new frontier for how individuals and small businesses take control of their data. The Smart Data Discovery Challenge has laid the groundwork for a larger prize later this year. We want the new prize to build on the success of our Open Up Challenges – they catapulted a new generation of open banking fintechs to enormous success. We want to do the same for even more companies using a far wider array of Smart Data to support innovations that benefit people in their everyday lives and make running a business easier and cheaper.
Louise Burke, CEO, the ODI said:
Smart Data represents a great opportunity to benefit consumers and has the potential to be a major driver of innovation. The first Smart Data scheme, Open Banking, has already created a healthy ecosystem of valuable services and providers. With the Smart Data Challenge, we are laying the foundation for the next level of responsible data innovation, expanding the benefits of Open Banking into energy, transport and beyond
Find out more about the winners of the Smart Data Discovery Challenge and keep up to date about the Smart Data Prize at smartdata.challenges.org
Additional Information
For media enquiries, please contact Andrew McKay, Emma Harvey and Robyn Margetts at challengeworks@seven-consultancy.com or call +44 (0)20 7754 3610.
Smart Data Discovery Challenge Finalists Use Cases
- Unbanx - Enriching open banking data to enable supercharged rewards for consumers – An app that allows consumers to gain added value from their purchase data through rewards. Integrating open banking purchase-level data with retailer’s receipt-level data (for example from in-store loyalty cards) could prove more valuable for consumers and businesses. This integration would empower consumers to take greater control and ownership over their data while offering opportunities to earn greater rewards.
- Ubiquitech Solutions – Supply chain and trade finance integration – Integrating shipping supply chains and cargo manifests into the Open Banking and trade finance sectors could help tackle the potential £224bn cost of current inefficiencies. It would integrate electronic tracking of vessels, containers, their contents, and the ownership of goods into online banking and trade finance applications. The move could free up liquidity in international financial markets, prevent delay at ports (and associated food waste that come with this) by integrating with “trusted trader” schemes, and help tackle organised crime.
- Open Property Data Association – Digital property packs for home buying and mortgages – Buying a house takes on average 22 weeks, is the third most stressful life event, and comes with high failure rates, unexpected costs, fraud and poor customer experience. The data needed comes from multiple, disparate sources, with each player in the transaction applying their own compliance standards. The use case aims to use data from across the property ecosystem to create a fully digital property pack for transactions so that data can be sourced and shared with trust.
- Moverly Ltd – Streamlining property transactions – Moverly enables effective data sharing across the real estate industry, connecting estate agents, banks, surveyors, and conveyancers, to make the process of buying and selling a property simpler. The platform is designed to support estate agents and consumers alike, offering an end-to-end property transaction experience powered by the capabilities of open data and AI and integrating the Property Data Trust Framework.
- Voltview – A smart energy marketplace for businesses – Unlike domestic consumers, small businesses are not protected by the energy price cap and face significant market volatility. By using half-hourly smart meter data, tariff data and credit checks, the platform would offer tailored energy solutions to businesses – it would enable users to anticipate future consumption changes before committing to contracts and assist in transitioning to time-of-use tariffs when economically viable.
- Data Catalyst Ltd – Smart ESG - An ESG platform, employing Smart Data from services SMEs already use, including Open Banking, Open Finance, energy data, employee travel, and business software. Smart ESG provides owners, customers, employees, and other stakeholders with a comprehensive understanding of their business and its impact across all three Environmental, Social, and Governance pillars, as well as carbon emissions.
- Mastercard Europe Services Ltd – ‘Get Clever’ - a first-of-its-kind data hub for small and micro businesses, providing rich insights enabling local, high street businesses to better compete with chains and bigger retailers. It combines consented Smart Data about a business’s revenue and expenditure with Mastercard real-time spend data and carbon calculation technology, enabling businesses to better engage their customers, manage their carbon footprint and contribute to net zero. This provides businesses with timely, robust data to grow their own business and create long-term resilience, building vibrant community-led high streets.
- Trust Power (trading as Loop) – lowering the cost of financing low-carbon homes – Mature technologies that reduce energy bills and carbon emissions, such as solar, home batteries, smart EV chargers, heat pumps and insulation, require finance. Banks want to finance them, but they are not energy experts. Combining household financial data with energy use data will enable innovative customer financing journeys that provide access to the cheapest financing sources that make low carbon homes accessible to the mass market.
- Hexapower – Reducing the cost of becoming a “prosumer” to accelerate the Net Zero transition – More people and businesses are transitioning from being electricity consumers, to “prosumers” who may generate, store and consume their own energy and participate in flexibility or energy efficiency schemes. However this shift could prove costly and take time. Using energy, financial and building data, Hexapower is developing AI systems that would help consumers to find the best way to become “prosumers”.
- Future Energy Associates – Identifying gaps in domestic EV infrastructure – There is a lack of understanding among consumers about who offers domestic charging infrastructure for electric vehicles (EVs) and the appropriate energy tariffs. It is hoped that it could incentivise the uptake of new EVs while helping shift their energy consumption to off-peak periods, avoiding both unnecessary expense to owners and additional high-carbon generation at peak times.