Benjamin Murphy

This week innovators, investors and tech giants come together at London Tech Week to assess the investment, innovation and talent which calls London home. Attendees include visionaries from over 90 countries seeking to apply new tech to solve the world’s biggest problems. These are enterprise tech leaders who are creating solutions to make work easier and life more fun.

In addition to all of the work the City of London Corporation are doing to embed technological advancements in our schools and to offer a curriculum which supports the future workforce skillset, I wanted to share a few examples with you of where the City Corporation is driving innovation of new technologies directly, improving lives, services and outcomes.

City of London Police: Action Fraud

As the national lead force coordinating the policing response to fraud, the City of London Police is creating a new service to replace Action Fraud – the national reporting service for fraud and cyber crime. A phased introduction of the new service is now underway and will continue throughout 2025. The first phase of the new service is the introduction of the new crime and intelligence management system which is called Foundry. The new platform began a phased introduction in 2024 and will result in fundamental new service improvements across three key areas:

1.      How intelligence is collated and gathered from multiple sources
2.      Speed up analysis of reports, matched against intelligence and sent to police forces for investigation
3.      Result in faster intelligence-based alerts and campaigns to warn the public.

City of London Police: Cyber Griffin

The City of London Police has also innovated a powerful service for City businesses to help protect themselves from growing cyber threats. Founded by the City of London Police in 2017, Cyber Griffin is a programme that offers free National Cyber Security Centre-accredited services to support businesses and individuals to protect themselves from cyber criminality. The team offers a range of services including baseline briefing, desktop exercises, incident response training and Cyber Capability Assessments. The number of individuals trained across the City grows year on year, with over 16,000 individuals trained last financial year. Satisfaction scores for the training are high, with the vast majority undertaking the training saying that they have changed their personal online behaviours as a consequence.

City of London Corporation: Innovation & Growth – Artificial Intelligence (AI)

The UK AI market is worth more than £16.9 billion and is expected to grow to £803.7 billion by 2035. This represents the third largest AI market in the world, behind only the US and China.  Financial services firms continue to be at the vanguard of UK adoption and investment, unlocking the technology’s benefits across data and analytics, fraud detection and customer services. The City of London Corporation are committed to addressing the barriers to AI adoption in the FPS sector, with numerous live workstreams across three key themes – strategy (including talent), investment, and regulation. For example:

• With respect to skills, our Women Pivoting to Digital Taskforce addresses talent shortages in digital and AI by reskilling women.
• With respect to investment, the Mansion House Accord aims to allocate a portion of pension funds to private markets, directing more capital toward AI startups / scaleups and technology development in the UK.
• With respect to regulation, we are working with the ecosystem to assess the needs of the FPS sector and communicate these to the regulators and government.

City of London Corporation: Innovation & Growth – Digital Verification

Digital verification (DV) is the foundation of a seamless, secure financial ecosystem, with DV technologies essential for ensuring that individuals and companies can securely prove their identities and credentials in the digital age.
In our recent report – Securing growth: the digital verification opportunity – we advanced a plan to create a scalable digital verification system (DVS) for the UK. It focuses on verifying individual consumers who use financial products and services.
The research shows that a secure, scalable, DVS could unlock huge economic value, boost security, reduce fraud, and streamline financial services. Specifically, we estimate that a secure DVS could unlock £1.8bn in economic value by 2031 and, in the same period, reduce fraud losses by at least £3bn.

City of London Corporation: Digital Planning

The City Corporation’s Digital Planning Team have been bolstering and modernising their reporting and analytical mechanisms, implementing robust data pipelines, and moving towards more “live time” reporting on applications throughout the planning application lifecycle. Through initiatives like the High Street Data Partnership the planning team are also supplementing their native data with that of third parties. Using data such as changes in footfall and spend, this allows the Corporation to assess how changes in the built environment affect how our residents, workers, and visitors interact with and experience the City.

The City Corporation has also released Thermal Comfort Guidelines, which is an internationally ground-breaking new planning tool, new to the British Planning system. It is a digital, algorithm based technical holistic tool which enhances the understanding of the microclimatic qualities of public spaces and provides methodology to assess the impact of developments on the microclimate. The technique involves merging complex wind, sunlight, temperature and humidity microclimate data at a seasonal level to obtain a holistic understanding of Thermal Comfort, how a microclimatic character of a place actually feels to the public.
The data is collated through 3D Digital modelling, computer fluid dynamics, climatic data, wind tunnel testing and humidity modelling which are combined in an algorithm-based series of metrics and criteria. It is innovative and imaginative as it quantifies how a human experiences the microclimate, the “real feel” factor across seasons. The criteria is used to ensure decisions address future heat stress from Climate change.

These are just a few of the example of how the City of London Corporation is helping to drive innovation and growth, by both creating and leveraging emerging technologies to help deliver its corporate objectives.