Britain’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) have announced a landmark collaboration aimed squarely at advancing AI testing, quality assurance standards, and regulatory innovation across the financial sector.
Revealed at the Singapore Fintech Festival this week, the partnership will focus on the joint testing of AI solutions, the exchange of regulatory insights, and a shared programme of collaborative events showcasing best-in-class QA and model validation practices.
The agreement is designed to create a secure and supervised testing environment where firms can validate AI models against real-world data and regulatory expectations.
For QA and software testing teams at banks, insurers and fintechs, the partnership represents a rare alignment between two of the world’s most proactive regulators, combining the FCA’s strong compliance frameworks with MAS’s established AI governance principles.
The FCA said the collaboration will support “safe and responsible AI innovation” while enabling UK and Singapore-based firms to scale more effectively across both markets.
It also marks the FCA’s first permanent presence in Singapore, with a Financial Services Attaché based at the British High Commission to strengthen regulatory and supervisory coordination.
London-based Jessica Rusu, the FCA’s Chief Data, Information and Intelligence Officer, explained that the new partnership would champion innovation while embedding structured testing and oversight into AI development.
She said that through the alliance with MAS, the regulators would “be championing safe and responsible AI innovation across UK and Singapore markets,” allowing firms to grow through collaboration, explore cross-border opportunities and shape “the future of responsible AI innovation in finance.”
Rusu was keen to stress that the FCA’s appointment in Singapore “helps us expand our network of financial services attachés around the world, strengthen our regulatory relationship with MAS and promote the UK as a global hub for financial services.”
Cross-border QA
For the FCA and MAS, the partnership is more than a symbolic gesture, it reflects a deliberate move toward shared QA infrastructure and coordinated regulatory testing.
Joint pilot programmes are expected to involve testing new AI models under comparable conditions, exchanging findings, and developing consistent metrics for assessing transparency, explainability and fairness in AI-driven financial tools.
The initiative builds directly on the FCA’s launch of its Supercharged Sandbox earlier this year, a collaborative AI testing platform developed with NVIDIA that allows regulated firms to run complex QA processes at scale.
As reported by QA Financial in June, the sandbox offers “access to high-performance AI infrastructure, regulatory support, and advanced tools for experimentation.”
Rusu said the sandbox was created to help firms that “want to test AI ideas but who lack the capabilities to do so,” enabling them to harness AI safely while ensuring market integrity and supporting economic growth.
Using NVIDIA’s accelerated computing environment, the sandbox allows QA engineers to simulate high-volume, real-time data conditions, run reproducibility checks, and monitor for bias or drift: capabilities that align closely with MAS’s emphasis on explainable and verifiable AI systems.
Dr Jochen Papenbrock, EMEA Head of Financial Technology at NVIDIA, said AI is “fundamentally reshaping the financial sector by automating processes, enhancing data analysis, and improving decision-making,” while the FCA’s sandbox “provides firms with a secure environment to explore AI innovations using NVIDIA’s full stack accelerated computing platform, supporting industry-wide growth and efficiency.”
MAS, for its part, has already embedded testing and assurance into its own frameworks through Project Guardian, a flagship initiative that explores tokenisation and AI use cases in financial services.
The FCA-MAS partnership effectively links these ecosystems, forming a transnational testing corridor that could become a blueprint for how global regulators approach AI assurance.
Broader context
The new partnership also lands against a backdrop of heightened regulatory focus on digital resilience and software reliability.
Across the UK, Europe and Asia, regulators are tightening their oversight of firms’ technology dependencies, testing standards and third-party risk management.
Former FCA director Christopher Woolard, now a partner at EY, warned earlier this year that “geopolitical changes are leading to a fragmented regulatory landscape,” increasing complexity for global firms.
He said regulators remain concerned about resilience and the “additional risks introduced through the financial sector’s growing reliance on third-party technology companies,” citing the 2024 CrowdStrike outage as an example of how a single software failure can cascade across markets.
In response, the FCA, the Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) and the Bank of England have launched joint consultations to align UK rules with Europe’s Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA), which took effect in January of this year.
The proposals aim to standardise incident reporting, define thresholds for systemic IT failures, and require firms to document how they test and validate critical third-party systems.
EY’s Jack Armstrong described the initiative as “a necessary evolution of the UK regulations to enhance visibility of operational resilience and systemic risks across the sector.”
He explained that the new reporting framework would bring consistency to how financial institutions share incident data and demonstrate assurance around testing, monitoring and recovery processes.
Testing for trust
MAS and the FCA have both built reputations as innovation-friendly regulators that prioritise safety, transparency and testability in financial systems.
MAS has been advancing explainable AI frameworks through its FEAT (Fairness, Ethics, Accountability and Transparency) principles, while the FCA has focused on integrating AI testing into regulatory sandboxes and digital resilience reviews.
Their partnership creates a shared foundation for firms to validate AI models under comparable QA conditions in two major markets.
For testing teams, it means access to clearer guidance, structured experimentation pathways, and cross-border assurance on model integrity and compliance readiness.
The FCA said its attaché in Singapore will coordinate the new collaboration with Camille Blackburn, the regulator’s Asia-Pacific Director based in Australia, and Tash Miah at the British Embassy in Washington, DC, part of its broader strategy to establish a global network of financial services attachés.
Innovative firms will be invited to take part in upcoming FCA–MAS AI Spotlight events to showcase solutions that support “safe and responsible innovation across UK and Singapore markets.”
For QA and software testing professionals, the FCA–MAS collaboration signals the emergence of a global AI testbed, one that goes beyond theoretical governance to real, testable compliance standards.
By integrating shared regulatory expectations into model validation processes, the partnership aims to improve not just innovation, but also assurance, interoperability and consumer trust.
In an increasingly complex regulatory landscape, the FCA and MAS are proving that the future of financial AI depends not only on creativity, but on testing, traceability and trust, principles that will now be reinforced through coordinated QA frameworks spanning both sides of the globe.
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