Eligibility criteria

Eligibility criteria – open call entrants

Any UK-based individual (or group of individuals) or UK registered incorporated entity (or group of entities) is eligible to submit one or more cross-sector Smart Data use case ideas in the open call.

Please note that financial awards made at the March Smart Data community event cannot be paid to individuals. Individuals will need to nominate a UK registered incorporated entity to receive any financial awards resulting from this event.

Eligibility criteria for cross-sector Smart Data use case ideas

To be eligible, the Smart Data use case idea (or ideas) that you submit in the open call must meet the following criteria:

1. Your use case idea must rely on using Smart Data. This means a situation where:

• Customer data is held by a business (or businesses) – the “data holder” (e.g. a bank or energy supplier)
• That data is shared with an authorised third party, at the customer’s request
• Using that data, the authorised third party provides some useful service to the customer.

The “use case idea” is a description of that service. For further background on what Smart Data is, see About Smart Data.

2. Your use case idea must use data held by data holders from one or more of the following five sectors:

• Financial services
• Energy
• Retail
• Transport
• Home buying

In addition, your use case idea might use other sources of publicly held or open data, or data that might be unlocked from other sectors, such as telecoms.

3. Your use case idea must be cross-sector, meaning that it must use consumer data held by data holders from more than one sector.

A number of the five wider sectors listed above include different sub-sectors. We consider use cases that span different sub-sectors to be cross-sector use cases. So the following would count as examples of cross-sector use cases: 

• A use case that uses banking data, and retail purchasing data (different wider sectors – financial services and retail)
• A use case that uses banking and insurance data (different sub-sectors in the wider financial services sector)
• A use case that uses mortgage, and surveying data (different sub-sectors in the wider home buying sector)

We are also interested in use case ideas that (in addition to using consumer data) use other kinds of contextual or business data to enhance the service to the consumer, e.g. prices of tariffs, services, or products, but this is not an eligibility requirement.

If you’re in doubt about whether your use case idea fits with the above eligibility criteria we encourage you to reach out to us at [email protected] and we can help you.

Learn more about the assessment and judging criteria