Typical Areas of R&D Activity

• Payments and core systems, real time processing, settlement optimisation, reconciliation engines and ISO 20022 transformation.
• Open banking and APIs, secure consent flows, third party integrations, data normalisation and performance at scale.
• Risk, fraud and AML, anomaly detection, graph analytics, model design, alert triage and false positive reduction.
• Trading and market data, low latency pipelines, pricing models, order routing, resilience and back testing frameworks.
• Data platforms, streaming architectures, privacy preserving analytics, lineage, governance and high availability.
• Cybersecurity, cryptography, secure enclave design, tokenisation, key management and zero trust architectures.
• Cloud and infrastructure, multiregion failover, observability, autoscaling under burst load and cost aware performance tuning.
• Explainable AI and model risk, interpretability methods, monitoring, drift detection and control frameworks.
• Regulatory technology, reporting engines, controls automation, evidence capture and audit ready pipelines.

Common Challenges

Financial systems must meet strict thresholds across security, availability and compliance, which blurs the lines between product delivery and genuine R&D. Defensible claims require clear evidence of technological uncertainty, systematic investigation and measurable outcomes.

• Defining uncertainty, demonstrating why solutions were not readily deducible from established patterns and vendor offerings.
• Evidence and traceability, linking requirements, design decisions, prototypes, model evaluations and test results to R&D objectives.
• Attribution, mapping staff, EPWs, subcontractors and eligible cloud costs to qualifying activities within complex programmes.
• Operational constraints, evidencing innovation while protecting sensitive data, client confidentiality and regulatory posture.

How We Support You

• Partner-led discovery with engineering, data, risk and security leads to surface non trivial technical work across programmes.
• Preparation of clear technical narratives that evidence baseline, uncertainty, approach and outcomes, aligned with HMRC interpretation.
• Financial mapping across staffing, EPWs, subcontracted development, software licensing and eligible cloud activity.
• Review of contractual and territorial considerations under the merged RDEC framework to protect claim integrity.
• Comprehensive enquiry defence included as standard, with evidence packs designed to minimise disruption if questions arise.
• Benchmarking of claim scope and value against sector peers and current reform trends to support best practice.