Co-author: Kate Lauer
Regulatory sandboxes may enable financial innovations that benefit excluded and underserved customers. In most cases, a regulatory sandbox is a framework set up by a financial sector regulator to allow small-scale, live testing of innovations by private firms in a controlled environment under the regulator’s supervision. This concept, which was developed in a time of rapid technological innovation in financial markets, is an attempt to address the frictions between regulators’ desire to encourage and enable innovation and the emphasis on regulation following the financial crisis of 2007–2008.