Raidiam’s Open Futurist, Marie Walker, reflects on the Ctrl-Shift Smart Data Forum 2026.
Last week I had the pleasure of attending - and speaking at - the Ctrl-Shift Smart Data Forum in London, now firmly established as the flagship gathering for the UK's smart data community. Over two packed days, the Smart Data Forum brought leaders from government, industry, regulation, and civil society came together to take stock of where the UK stands and what it will take to move from policy ambition to genuine delivery. Having tracked this space since long before ‘Smart Data’ became the UK shorthand for it, I left with a strong sense of shared purpose.
Liz Brandt's opening keynote set the tone with characteristic clarity. Her framing - ‘pushing rope’ for the past eight years, and now finally ‘pulling together’ - resonated deeply with anyone who has spent time building the governance and trust foundations that most of the world still hasn't got right. The rope, as she put it, is now taut. Everyone is facing the same direction. The question is no longer whether smart data will work, but how fast we can scale it.
The numbers are beginning to bear this out. One in five UK consumers and small businesses now actively use open banking, up from one in seventeen just four years ago. In January 2026 alone, 1.3 million people paid their self-assessment tax bills via open banking, settling £4.7 billion instantly. These aren't pilots or proofs of concept - they're infrastructure. Liz Brandt's call to ‘step into the sunlight’ felt entirely apt: the invisible work of those early years is now becoming mainstream, and it's time to celebrate that and build on it.
Minister for Digital Economy Liz Lloyd's keynote reinforced the government's commitment with specifics. The target of at least five active smart data schemes by 2030 and 20 or more by 2035, backed by £36 million in funding and anchored in the Data Use and Access Act 2025, signals that this is now firmly core industrial policy rather than a marginal digital initiative. The estimated annual GDP contribution of over £9 billion by 2043 is a number worth remembering the next time someone asks why trust infrastructure matters!
I was delighted to join the panel on 'Smart Data at the Tipping Point: Creating the right conditions for innovation and trust' - and to be in such good company doing it. My thanks go to my fellow panellists: Sue Daley (Director of Technology & Innovation, techUK), Kate Jones (CEO, Digital Regulation Cooperation Forum), Simone Plances (Smart Data Accelerator Manager, FCA), Richard Syers (Principal Policy Advisor, ICO), and Jamie Winch (Jamie Winch (Senior Innovation & Stakeholder Manager, HM Land Registry). The conversation was genuinely productive, and I think we surfaced something important.
The central tension in smart data right now isn't ambition versus caution - it's governance architecture. Too little governance erodes the consumer trust on which adoption depends; too much suppresses the very innovation that makes the investment worthwhile. From Raidiam's perspective, having designed and delivered trust frameworks across multiple jurisdictions, the answer lies in building governance into the infrastructure itself rather than layering it on afterwards. Security-by-design, FAPI-compliant API security, and standards-based consent and identity frameworks aren't bureaucratic overhead - they're what makes scale possible. The DRCF's non-statutory coordination model and the FCA's Smart Data Accelerator work represent genuine progress on this, the next step is to create a mechanism for driving interoperability without mandating identical approaches in every sector.
The ICO's evolving role in this landscape, and what changes to its structure mean for personal data governance, was also a thread worth pulling - one I expect we'll be returning to as the schemes develop.
A thread running through both days was the relationship between smart data and agentic AI. The agentic AI market is projected to grow from $7 billion today to $52 billion by 2030. That is an extraordinary number, and it is almost entirely contingent on the quality and trustworthiness of the data that agents can access.
Liz Brandt's formulation is worth repeating: agentic AI is only as good, and only as safe, as the data it can access and trust. The use cases - an agent that holds your entire home-buying journey, or manages an elderly parent's health, financial, and benefits data, or proactively works the job market using verified skills and employment history - are compelling precisely because they depend on verified, permissioned, current data. That is what Smart Data builders have been constructing for years. The arrival of agentic AI at scale doesn't make that work redundant; it makes it urgent and valuable in ways that are now commercially legible to a much wider audience.
At Raidiam, this is where we see the strategic opportunity for the UK. The governance foundations, the FAPI-compliant security standards, the consent and identity infrastructure - these are not just compliance overhead. They are the preconditions for a trustworthy agentic economy. The UK's advantage is that it is spending the time building them, and is actively working to coordinate across sectors from the start. The risk is that AI moves faster than governance can adapt. The forum's consensus - that the answer is agile governance embedded in infrastructure, not bolted on after the fact - is the right one.
I also had the honour of chairing the closing panel of the two-day forum - 'Learnings from International Smart Data Schemes: Achieving Economic Growth Potential' - and it was a fittingly ambitious note to end on. My thanks to panellists: Ekaterina Borisova (Technical Specialist, Smart Data Accelerator, FCA), Wijitleka Marome (Chief Representative, Bank of Thailand), Kwangseok Choi (Manager, Office of External Relations, Korea Credit Information Services), and Pavle Avramovic (Research Affiliate, Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance, and Director of Research & Policy at Financial Innovation for Impact).
The framing question - where does the UK actually sit in the international picture? - is one worth asking honestly, and this panel did so. The UK rightly claims the pioneering position on open banking, but the world has not stood still.
Korea's MyData framework, now in its second generation following the June 2025 upgrade, offers a striking and hugely impressive counterpoint: 56 operating licensed companies, over 1.4 trillion cumulative API calls, and - most tellingly - a single unified API standard covering all financial sectors simultaneously, from banking and insurance to investment and telecoms. Where the UK expanded sector by sector, Korea standardised across the entire financial system in one coordinated effort through working groups involving regulators, institutions, and fintechs together. The result is a level of domestic interoperability that the UK is still building towards across open finance. Kwangseok also highlighted Korea's most recent innovation: an AI-driven automated interest rate reduction service launched in February 2026, where a single consumer consent triggers an agent to continuously monitor and act on the consumer's behalf - a live example of the agentic data economy that much of Day 1 discussed in prospective terms.
Wijitleka brought a different and equally important perspective from Thailand, where the central bank's approach illustrates what "leapfrogging" actually looks like in practice. Emerging market and developing economies don't inherit the legacy constraints of established financial infrastructure - which can be an advantage. They also face different design challenges around inclusion, mobile-first delivery, and the absence of the regulatory scaffolding that the UK built over years. The question of whether a country can shortcut the governance-building phase, or whether it must be earned through iteration, ran through much of the discussion.
Pavle's work at CCAF on enabling open finance in emerging markets and developing economies - including a forthcoming report examining nine countries at varying stages of their open finance journey - provided the analytical backbone for this. His three-pillar framework of incentives, liability, and performance measurement captures something that I think the UK conversation sometimes underweights: regulatory obligation alone is insufficient to drive ecosystem participation. Korea's own MyData 1.0 experience proved this. Early limitations around incomplete data coverage, cumbersome consent processes, and an absent revenue model-led several operators to surrender their licences before the 2.0 reforms addressed them. Designing for operator sustainability and consumer convenience at the outset - not as afterthoughts - is a lesson that translates directly to the UK's incoming schemes.
Ekaterina brought the FCA's perspective on how the UK is thinking about this internationally, including through Project Aperta and the broader question of cross-border data portability. This is genuinely unresolved territory. Korea's legal framework imposes meaningful constraints on cross-border transfers, and formal mutual recognition between the UK and other jurisdictions remains some way off. But the conversation is happening - and forums like this one are part of how it advances.
The overarching theme that emerged was that there is no single model to copy, but there are clear lessons to extract. Governance structures matter as much as technical standards. Incentive design matters as much as mandate. And the countries making fastest progress are those treating open data infrastructure as a system design problem - not a compliance exercise.
The Ctrl-Shift Smart Data Forum continues to be the event where the UK's smart data community thinks out loud together. The mood was not complacent - there is too much still to do for that - but it was purposeful and positive. The delivery decade, as Liz Brandt called it, has genuinely begun. We now need much greater clarity on what infrastructure will/might be provided for the first UK schemes - finance, retail, energy, property, and transport - what industry will be required to build, and when consultations on secondary legislation will begin, so that organisations can plan and invest with confidence. That clarity will be essential if the UK is to turn ambition into durable delivery.
It was also encouraging to see practical delivery recognised this week, with Raidiam’s work on the Smart Property Data Trust Framework winning the Trust, Consent & Governance Award at the Smart Data Forum Awards 2026. Working with the Council for Licensed Conveyancers and Open Property Data Association, the project is already moving from framework to live sandbox, and it is exactly the kind of implementation the forum was championing.
My thanks to the Ctrl-Shift team for curating such a high-quality two days, and to all the speakers, panellists, roundtable participants, and corridor conversations that made it worthwhile.