Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Smart data enables individual consumers and business customers to access and share their data simply and securely with third parties, enabling those third parties to provide them with innovative services. “Smart data” is the collective term for the group of technologies and policies that will make this possible. Read more on our About Smart Data page.

The five sectors are financial services, energy, retail, transport, and home buying (but note that your use case idea may use data from other sectors too – see the eligibility criteria). We have not provided detailed or restrictive definitions of these sectors as we want to encourage innovative ideas, and we hope that it will usually be clear which sector(s) data relates to. If in doubt please contact us and we will help you.

In the Smart Data Discovery Challenge we are asking you to imagine new cross-sector services for consumers and small businesses that could in principle be developed if the relevant Smart Data schemes existed.

The basic building blocks of Smart Data are described in About Smart Data. Although the technical details of how Smart Data gets implemented in the future may vary from sector to sector, we invite you to propose use case ideas assuming these building blocks will apply to all Smart Data schemes.

Yes, we welcome use cases ideas that use publicly available or open data, but your idea must also use customer data and, where appropriate, business data. Please check the eligibility criteria for the full requirements.

We anticipate that we would seek to encourage further development of at least some of the most promising use case ideas identified in the Discovery Challenge through the Smart Data challenge prize, if this goes ahead.

We will run a separate entry process for the Smart Data challenge prize. If you are interested in the Smart Data challenge prize, we expect that participating in the Discovery Challenge will give you useful and relevant insight that may help you in developing an entry to the challenge prize.

Yes, you will retain your intellectual property rights in your entry to the Challenge.

We may carry out publicity and promotion for the Challenge and publish our research and evaluation in relation to the Challenge. You agree, and you confirm that your partners agree, to the use of each of your organisation names and a summary of your entry in promotion and publications in any media and online and to participate in any other publicity reasonably required by Nesta or DBT in connection with the Challenge. Before publication, we will inform you of what we intend to publish.

If your use case idea is longlisted after the open call, we would like to share a version of your use case idea with other participants in the invite-only workshop (February 2024). To get the full benefit from this workshop it will be important that participants are willing to share their use case ideas with one another, for example so that similar opportunities and challenges that apply across different use cases can be identified and solutions to these challenges identified.

If your use case idea was longlisted following the open call, we will invite you to pitch your use case idea at the Smart Data community event that will take place in March 2024. A prize pot worth up to £20,000, with individual prizes up to £5,000 each, will be allocated between the most promising pitches.

Yes. If you wish to submit more than one use case idea, you should submit these separately. Please note that each individual entrant will only be eligible to win one prize in the March 2024 pitching event.

Unfortunately we do not expect to be able to provide feedback to all entrants submitting use case ideas in the open call.

We hope that the Challenge will demonstrate that Smart Data has the potential to provide a benefit to consumers, from easing the Cost of Living to delivering public services. Please see the eligibility criteria outlined on the Challenge website.

Part 3 of the Data Protection and Digital Information Bill, which is currently passing through Parliament, will enable a Secretary of State, or the Treasury, to establish a Smart Data scheme. 

Scheme specific regulations, will specify the scope of a Smart Data scheme, including the companies defined as “data holders”, and the data they will either publish or share with the customer or an authorised third party. This can include customer and wider business data. 

As a specific example in the energy sector, specific regulation for a Smart Energy scheme will determine whether energy tariff rates are within scope. 

The Smart Data Discovery Challenge is currently only seeking ideas to understand potential use cases and challenges that might arise from them. The challenge will help to inform government thinking about Smart Data and the robust regulatory environment required to enable it to ensure Smart Data is used safely and securely.

The assessment criteria are available on our website; if you have any further questions on the criteria we recommend you book a one-to-one call with a member of our team to talk it through Calendly.

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.

In the DPDI (No.2) Bill currently going through Parliament, a ‘third party’ is an entity authorised to receive business data from a data holder. See About Smart Data for a high level description of how Smart Data works and the relationship between user (consumer), data holder and third party. Also, see the definition of Third Party Provider in the existing UK Open Banking scheme.

Part 3 of the Data Protection and Digital (DPDI) Bill (No.2) is seeking powers, through a new legislative framework, to extend the government’s ability to establish Smart Data schemes and enable data portability and openness. 

The government has already committed to using the powers to establish an open data scheme for road fuel prices through laying secondary legislation (subject to consultation), and to provide Open Banking with a long term regulatory framework. It has also recently consulted on an ‘Open Communications’ scheme in the broadband and mobile markets. In parallel, the government is actively exploring further opportunities for Smart Data to benefit customers in different sectors.