Marking its eighth anniversary, FinTech Scotland reports that the nation’s fintech cluster has more than doubled in size in the past five years – from just over 120 firms in 2020 to more than 260 today.
This growth has been driven by higher levels of investment, partnerships across industry, academia and the public sector, and more businesses scaling up and trading internationally.
Innovation in practice has also taken a major step forward, with the 10-year FinTech Research and Innovation Roadmap now embedded and more than 40% of recommended actions under way.
Central to this has been the 2025 Financial Regulation Innovation Lab (FRIL), which aims to create the right conditions for collaboration and product development. A recent example is the partnership where fintech firm Amiqus moved from an initial pilot to live production with Virgin Money, using artificial intelligence in business banking onboarding.
Also during 2025, the cluster launched two new initiatives: the Centre of Excellence in Distributed Ledger Technology – focusing on digital assets, payments and tokenisation – and the Finance and Health Lab – a pilot research and innovation programme dedicated to improving financial wellbeing across Scotland.
Aleks Tomczyk, chief executive of FinTech Scotland, said: “The doubling of Scotland’s fintech density is a clear signal that our collaborative and cluster-based approach is working.
“As I begin 2026 as FinTech Scotland’s new chief executive, I look forward to leading our plans to support the next stages of cluster growth and thereby accelerate successful business growth and innovation in financial technology.”
Callum Murray, chief executive of Amiqus, said: “FinTech Scotland has provided practical ongoing support to Amiqus and many other fintech scale ups across the country for many years.
“Our involvement in their FRIL innovation programme dramatically accelerated relationships with large scale banks, built trust in our capability to deliver at scale and directly led to us securing a new ongoing client partnership.”
FinTech Scotland was founded in January 2018 as a joint initiative by University of Edinburgh, Lloyds Banking Group, HSBC and Scottish Enterprise.