This project will demonstrate and integrate AI/ML capabilities into 'WikiKore', a game-changing innovation that enables more sustainable, effective, inclusive and considered financial markets. This project brings together: \* The award-winning team at **Kore Labs**: 'Best Digital Product Governance SaaS Solution 2024 and 2025'-Wealth and Finance International, 'Innovate Finance Women in FinTech Powerlist 2020/21/22/23, selected for the FCA's Innovation Pathways in 2023 (ongoing) \* **National Innovation Centre for Data**: Global hub to facilitate links between innovators, businesses and academia (funded under the UK Government's Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy) \* **Crowe-Singapore (Singapore):** Specialist regulatory advisory company in the financial services sector and working closely with the Monetary Authority of Singapore (FCA equivalent) Innovate UK funding will enable the established team at Kore Labs to build on concept work completed in an IUK-funded project (10004689). This concept involves the use of collaboratively created open data sources that can be orchestrated and federated (similar in approach to Gaia-X (European initiative for secure and federated data infrastructure and services)) to enable interoperability and standardisation in complex data sets on a global scale. In this project, the consortium will start to implement and prove (Proof-of-Concept to Prototype) aspects of AI & ML to enable advanced capabilities including planning, reasoning and prediction. This represents the 'next-generation' of AI capabilities and will position the partners ahead of the wave of novel applications of AI/ML. A key obstacle to transparency, governance and fairness in financial markets is the non-standardised technical language used by the financial industry, which is beset with complex terminology, jargon and ambiguity, often incomprehensible to consumers. This is true in the UK, Singapore and globally. WikiKore will be the first-ever all-encompassing digital encyclopaedia of taxonomy for the global financial industry which is set to drive international product governance in financial services and address the key challenge of standardisation of technical language. This will establish a new state-of-the-art, setting new standards for efficiency and transparency in financial markets whilst directly addressing the aims of global regulators to achieve best outcomes for consumers and businesses worldwide. In the medium-term, Kore will pass ownership of the Opensource Content of Wikikore to non-profit/academic/NGO partners such as NICD.

Consumers often find the technical language used by financial services providers inconsistent and impossible to understand. This creates the impression that the industry lacks transparency and good governance. Decisions made by financial institutions about big, life-changing products can feel unfair. Kore proposes tackling the sector's language challenges by accelerating the development of WikiKore, the world's first digital encyclopaedia of financial products and services based on a standardised taxonomy. The platform will harness the power of AI and machine learning, enabling it to analyse trends, deliver accurate forecasts and make proactive recommendations. The WikiKore platform, whose content is kept up to date through a combination of AI and global experts from leading financial services firms, compiles technical terminology, metrics and process elements into logical subsets. Contributors include some of the most prominent financial institutions in the UK. Prior to its soft launch in 2023, WikiKore attracted the support of Innovate UK with three grants. Earlier this year, the Financial Conduct Authority onboarded WikiKore into its selective "Innovation Pathways" programme, an initiative involving the United Kingdom Accreditation Service (UKAS) as an observer and the National Center for Innovation in Data (NICD). The WikiKore project is led by the award-winning team at Kore Labs, a business described by the organisers of Money 20/20 in June 2024 as "one of Europe's top six startups that are poised to transform the world of money." Kore Labs is led by Founder and CEO Sabrina Del Prete, who has appeared on the 'Innovate Finance Women in FinTech Powerlist' every year since 2020 and was crowned EISA/Octopus Entrepreneur of the Year 2023\. WikiKore sits alongside Kore Lab's groundbreaking product management and governance platform, KorePRM - the first ever SaaS solution for end-to-end digital product management in financial services. Kore is proposing a prototype technology service: Wikikore Agentic AI. This will support our target users - employees with financial services providers - in standardising complex financial language. Kore has identified that users often create their own taxonomy features and data options. This exacerbates the problem of inconsistent and hard-to-understand language. This project will move WikiKore from using AI for classification (of financial product features), through generation (prediction of user needs and matching features to products), to a point where the AI/ML embedded in WikiKore can plan and reason in more abstract environments (such as time-series). This advanced analysis capability represents the next era of AI/ML capabilities to 2030\.

This project will lay out the technical roadmap for the integration of AI/ML capabilities into 'WikiKore', a game-changing innovation that enables more sustainable, effective, inclusive and considered financial markets. This project brings together: * The award-winning team at **Kore Labs**: 'Most Innovative Digital Product Governance SaaS Solution 2021'-Wealth and Finance International, and 'Innovate Finance Women in FinTech Powerlist 2020/21/22' * **National Innovation Centre for Data**: Global hub to facilitate links between innovators, businesses and academia (funded under HM Government International R&I Strategy) Innovate UK funding will enable the established team at Kore Labs to build on concept work completed in an IUK-funded project (10004689). This concept involves the use of collaboratively created open data sources that can be orchestrated and federated to enable interoperability and standardisation in complex data sets - similar in approach to Gaia-X (European initiative for secure and federated data infrastructure and services). In this project, the consortium will conduct a technical feasibility into the implementation of AI & ML to enable advanced capabilities including planning, reasoning and prediction. This represents the 'next-generation' of AI capabilities and will position Kore and NICD ahead of the wave of novel applications of AI/ML. Based on the WikiKore concept and work-to-date, Kore Labs has been selected by The Investment Association, the trade body and industry voice for UK investment managers, to participate in their 2022/3 fintech innovation accelerator, providing the industry partners and market access required to rapidly commercialise WikiKore. A key obstacle to transparency, governance and fairness in financial markets is the non-standardised technical language used by the financial industry, which is beset with complex terminology, jargon and ambiguity, often incomprehensible to consumers. WikiKore will be the first-ever all-encompassing digital encyclopaedia of taxonomy for the financial industry which is set to drive global product governance in financial services and address the key challenge of standardisation of technical language. This will set a new state-of-the-art, establishing new standards for efficiency and transparency in financial markets whilst directly addressing the aims of global regulators to achieve best outcomes for consumers and businesses worldwide. In the medium-term, Kore will pass ownership of the Opensource Content of Wikikore to non-profit/academic/NGO partners such as NICD.

Since the financial crisis in 2008, good governance around the development and distribution of financial products has been identified as a weak link in the financial services sector and an area that needs to be completely re-defined. Products are becoming increasingly complex and poorly controlled. The number and diversity of financial products are rapidly increasing, whilst a surge of mergers and business integrations are further complicating product sets. Products have long lifecycles and financial institutions are constrained in their ability to retire legacy products. Despite formidable progress in terms of regulations and processes, not a single enterprise-level software solution has emerged with a focus on end-to-end product governance. Many Fintechs have addressed specific aspects, but all have missed the big picture. The industry urgently needs a solution that is all-encompassing and future-proofed. A key obstacle to transparency and governance in financial markets is the technical language used by the financial industry, which is non-standardised and beset with complex terminology, jargon and ambiguity in definition. Kore Labs (Kore), an award-winning UK RegTech, has demonstrated success through developing a product governance Software-as-a-Service platform 'KorePRM' for financial institutions, simplifying financial product information, enhancing product compliance and reducing manual processes. KorePRM will directly address market challenges by enabling a single view of all financial products, and have a 360-degree view of each product, with both technical and non-technical features, in a uniform data format. KorePRM has been specifically designed to meet key regulatory requirements and evidence compliance in financial services. It is underpinned by the first ever taxonomy and data model for FIs which is standardised and client-centric by design. KorePRM substantively supports the industry's need for agreed standards and will accelerate industry efforts to codify the link between products and clients. In this project, Kore will develop KorePRM's second evolution to scale globally. This will have a transformative impact on efficiency and transparency in financial markets whilst directly addressing the aims of global regulators to achieve the best outcomes for consumers and businesses worldwide; cementing the UK as the leader in RegTech worldwide.

Since the financial crisis in 2008, good governance around the development and distribution of financial products has been identified as a weak link in the financial services sector and an area that needs to be completely re-defined. Products are becoming increasingly complex and poorly controlled. The number and diversity of financial products are rapidly increasing, whilst a surge of mergers and business integrations are further complicating product sets. Products have long lifecycles and financial institutions are constrained in their ability to retire legacy products. Despite formidable progress in terms of regulations and processes, not a single enterprise-level software solution has emerged with a focus on end-to-end product governance. Many Fintechs have addressed specific aspects, but all have missed the big picture. The industry urgently needs a solution that is all-encompassing and future-proofed. A key obstacle to transparency and governance in financial markets is the technical language used by the financial industry, which is non-standardised and beset with complex terminology, jargon and ambiguity in definition. Kore Labs (Kore), an award-winning UK RegTech, has demonstrated success through developing a product governance Software-as-a-Service platform 'KorePRM' for financial institutions, simplifying financial product information, enhancing product compliance and reducing manual processes. KorePRM will directly address market challenges by enabling a single view of all financial products, and have a 360-degree view of each product, with both technical and non-technical features, in a uniform data format. KorePRM has been specifically designed to meet key regulatory requirements and evidence compliance in financial services. It is underpinned by the first ever taxonomy and data model for FIs which is standardised and client-centric by design. KorePRM substantively supports the industry's need for agreed standards and will accelerate industry efforts to codify the link between products and clients. In this project, Kore will develop KorePRM's second evolution to scale globally. This will have a transformative impact on efficiency and transparency in financial markets whilst directly addressing the aims of global regulators to achieve the best outcomes for consumers and businesses worldwide; cementing the UK as the leader in RegTech worldwide.

A key obstacle to transparency, governance and fairness in financial markets is the technical language used by the financial industry, which is non-standardised, beset with complex terminology, jargon and ambiguity, often incomprehensible to consumers. This project will prototype and test 'WikiKore', a game-changing innovation that will enable more sustainable, effective, inclusive and considered financial markets. WikiKore is the first-ever all-encompassing digital encyclopaedia of taxonomy for the financial industry which is set to drive global product governance in financial services and overcome the key technical challenge of standardisation of technical language. This will set a new state-of-the-art standard for efficiency and transparency in financial markets whilst directly addressing the aims of global regulators to achieve best outcomes for consumers and businesses worldwide. This project is led by the award-winning team at **Kore Labs**: 'Most Innovative Digital Product Governance SaaS Solution 2021'-Wealth and Finance International, led by CEO Sabrina Del Prete: 'Innovate Finance Women in FinTech Powerlist' 2020, 2021 & 2022\. Funding will enable the established team at Kore Labs to build on the "WikiKore Concept" work completed in an IUK-funded project (10004689) in December 2022\. The "WikiKore Concept" involves the use of collaboratively created & curated open data sources that can be orchestrated and federated (similar in approach to Gaia-X) to enable interoperability and standardisation in complex data sets. Based on the "WikiKore Concept" and WikiKore MVP, Kore Labs has been selected by: 1. The Investment Association (IA), trade body for UK investment managers, to participate in their 2022 fintech innovation accelerator, and 2. The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) for their 2023 Innovation cohort. In the medium-term, Kore will pass ownership of the Opensource Content of WikiKore to a not-for-profit organisation, ensuring neutrality and trust.

Since the financial crisis in 2008, product governance has been identified as the weak link in the financial services sector and as an area that needs to be completely redefined. Despite formidable progress in terms of regulations and processes, digital end-to-end product governance is still in its infancy. Many financial technology companies have addressed specialised aspects of product governance, but financial institutions still rely heavily on manual processes to provide a 360-view of the lifecycle of their products. With our first-to-market AI-powered SaaS solution for product governance in financial services, we are turning the issue of product governance on its head. We do not digitise product governance processes; we embed good practices and AI-based tools throughout a digital environment for product lifecycle management so that robust governance becomes an inevitable by-product. Crucially, we build corporate memory, with product events and historical information retrievable at the touch of a button and stored in a uniform format. **We believe that digital transformation does not need to be difficult.** Our solution is fully configurable and modular, each module is self-standing and can be added over time, therefore implementation can be staggered. No big-bang data migration is required to use Kore and there is no need to update existing data sources. We do not require heavy system integrations to function. Our digital layer collects information and provides insight whilst sitting above legacy systems. We have the flexibility to integrate with existing applications and services, and with external systems and data providers. **Our approach to product data is unique.** We consider financial products not as a set of technical features, but as the result of a broad set of events, processes, decisions, people's actions and, most importantly, client needs. We collect and analyse data around all these categories throughout the entire product lifecycle with our open content, AI-powered online encyclopaedia, WikiKore. No other company in the market collects such a dynamic and rich set of product data with the purpose of improving the industry from within. **We use the latest applications of AI to power our application.** Kore develops proprietary AI algorithms, as well as establishing partnerships with research organisation and technology companies, specifically designed to drive seamless user interactions, brand-new insight and predictive analysis with the purpose of improving product governance for the financial service industry.

Financial institutions (FIs) manage a large number and a wide variety of products, e.g. credit cards, investment funds, pensions etc. The number and diversity of products managed is increasing as new products are added. Products have long lifecycles, and FIs are constrained in their ability to retire legacy products. The industry faces increasing regulatory requirements to: document product development and monitoring processes ensure that these processes are consumer-centric, e.g. identify and document a target market evidence that senior managers have oversight of all product being distributed (by the end of 2019 this will be subject to a personal liability clause if the senior manager fails in this duty) In short, the volume and complexity of financial products' records are increasing. Current product management platforms are product specific and focused on managing the operational aspects, e.g. making payments, managing risk, etc. This causes an inconsistent approach and oversight to product management with a substantial impact on FIs' productivity and on wider society too (as it is a major contributor to poorer outcomes and value for consumers). As such, there is a strong demand for a platform to support the management of products in a consistent and regulatory compliant way. In other words, a platform that: establishes a single "golden source" of product information creates a "one-view" of products in a single product hub, with no silos captures and retains the history of a product, from idea generation to retirement allows staff to interact with products readily and supports their activities, simplifying product related tasks and reducing manual process We aim to create such a financial product lifecycle management platform. Our first step is to create a prototype which delivers the major components for a single product family, namely investment funds. Our team are experienced financial product practitioners with more than 70 years' collective experience. Our solution can bring substantial benefits to the financial services industry and, most importantly, to customers around the world.