REGnosys has welcomed additional government funding for the Centre for Finance, Innovation and Technology, as ministers outlined broader measures for the UK fintech sector.

Chief executive and founder Leo Labeis described the extra £1 million for CFIT as a positive step, but argued that support for growth must go beyond funding announcements and policy signals. He focused on the practical systems and standards firms need to expand and remain in the UK market.

His intervention places REGnosys within a wider debate over how Britain can retain fintech companies as they mature. Ministers have sought to improve the environment for listings and investment, but parts of the sector want greater attention on the structures that govern data, reporting and compliance.

Labeis linked that issue to the government’s recent emphasis on capital markets and initial public offerings. Better listing conditions matter, he said, but they are only one factor for companies deciding where to build and grow.

“Additional support for CFIT is welcome, and it is encouraging to see the conversation at UK FinTech Week focus not just on innovation, but on the conditions firms need to scale in the UK. The future of UK fintech will rely as much on coordination and delivery as it does on new ideas.

The renewed focus from government on capital markets competitiveness and IPO attractiveness is also important. Measures that improve the listing environment send a positive signal to founders and investors, but the real test is whether that ambition is matched by investment in the infrastructure that makes growth operationally viable.

Common data models, machine-readable rules and interoperable reporting frameworks are no longer technical afterthoughts. They are strategic enablers of a modern financial system, helping firms scale more efficiently, reduce compliance friction and strengthen resilience.

London already has deep pools of capital, world-class talent and a strong regulatory base. To build on that, the UK has to show it will back high-growth sectors such as RegTech with the modern infrastructure needed to innovate, scale and ultimately list here,” Labeis said.

Infrastructure Focus

The comments highlight a recurring concern among financial technology companies: growth is constrained not only by access to capital, but also by fragmented operational requirements. Firms expanding across regulated markets must navigate multiple reporting formats, differing data standards and rulebooks that remain difficult to translate into automated systems.

For RegTech companies, those frictions sit at the centre of their business models. The sector argues that clearer data structures and machine-readable regulation can reduce duplication for both financial institutions and supervisors, while making it easier for smaller firms to compete.

That view aligns with a broader push in UK financial services to modernise the plumbing behind regulation. Common data models can help institutions use the same definitions across internal systems and external reporting. Machine-readable rules aim to convert legal and supervisory requirements into formats software can process more directly. Interoperable reporting frameworks are intended to reduce the need for firms to submit similar information repeatedly in different ways.

Scale And Listings

The listing question remains politically sensitive because many UK technology firms have chosen to raise capital or float in other markets. Policymakers increasingly frame that trend as both a competitiveness issue and a test of whether Britain can turn early-stage innovation into larger domestic businesses.

Labeis’s remarks suggest the answer will depend partly on whether regulatory and reporting systems keep pace with policy ambitions. Even where capital is available, firms may still weigh the costs of compliance, integration and expansion when deciding where to locate teams, invest and seek a public listing.

London already offers established advantages in finance, skills and regulation, he noted. His argument is that maintaining that position now requires sustained backing for the systems that make those strengths usable for fast-growing companies.

The focus on RegTech is notable because the sector often sits between financial services policy and digital infrastructure policy. Supporters say it can improve efficiency and resilience across the wider market, rather than serving only a narrow group of software firms.

By framing common data models, machine-readable rules and reporting standards as strategic rather than technical issues, Labeis pushed the discussion beyond fintech promotion alone. His central point was that if the UK wants more firms to scale and list domestically, the operating environment must support that ambition.

2025 was the year that exposed the gap between cyber strategy and operational reality. For UK security leaders, the lesson learned was that resilience, sustainability, and judgement mattered more than volume. Now, the challenge is responding to threats with clarity until one inevitably succeeds.

By the end of 2025, it became clear that cyber resilience was no longer a theoretical ambition. Now, it’s an operational reality being tested under sustained pressure.

Last year exposed the limits of security models built for a different pace, a different scale, and a different kind of attacker. Familiar access techniques, such as phishing and credential compromise, continued to dominate, but the damage came later. Attacks moved quietly, used trusted access, and blended into normal behaviour for long enough to evade traditional detection.

For many organisations, this can be classed as a failure of assumptions, as opposed to a tooling failure.

Once attackers were inside, security strategies built for prevention struggled. SOC teams were overwhelmed by volume, and they found it harder to identify the signals that mattered. Operating models stretched by skills shortages and alert fatigue began to show signs of strain.

2025 forced a shift in mindset. Rather than asking ‘How do we stop everything?’, the question became something more honest and useful. Now, it was ‘How prepared are we when something inevitably gets through?’

That shift will define cyber resilience in 2026.

Resilience replaces perfection

Resilience has long been discussed as a strategic goal. In 2025, it was seen as a practical measure of effectiveness.

The organisations that coped the best were those that could detect, contain, and recover with confidence. Having the largest number of controls didn’t determine success. They understood that incidents were sequences of behaviour unfolding over time.

Early visibility, clear escalation paths, and disciplined response mattered more than flawless prevention.

In environments where attackers relied on legitimate credentials and lateral movement, rather than malware, that was evident. When malicious behaviour looks like normal activity, resilience depends on context and judgement, not volume-based alerting.

The lesson we should take is uncomfortable, but important. Security programmes designed around perfection break under pressure. Those designed around preparedness adapt and thrive.

SOC sustainability became a leadership issue

Another defining theme of 2025 was the growing strain on security operations centres.

Alert volumes continued to rise as environments expanded across identity, cloud, network, and SaaS platforms. Analyst burnout, skills shortages, and cost pressures all became structural challenges rather than short-term issues. Decisions around data ingestion, retention, and prioritisation were now directly affecting visibility and response capability.

What many organisations discovered was that SOC sustainability is a leadership concern. When analysts spend most of their time validating low-value signals, the risks become hidden. Once teams are stretched thin, the ability to respond decisively degrades long before dashboards reflect a serious problem.

SOC effectiveness will be judged less by activity and more by focus. The ability to prioritise the right signals, at the right time, with the right context will matter more than the number of alerts processed.

AI: Accelerating outcomes, exposing weak operating models

AI featured prominently in security discussions throughout 2025, often framed as a solution to scale and skills challenges. In practice, it acted more like a stress test.

Where operating models were disciplined, AI helped reduce noise, accelerate investigation, and preserve analyst time for judgement. Where processes were unclear or poorly governed, AI amplified inconsistency and introduced new risk.

AI isn’t an immature solution. Instead, AI just doesn’t compensate for weak foundations.

Over-automation, particularly in areas that require explainability and accountability, proved risky. The most effective applications of AI were those that supported prioritisation and context. They shouldn’t be used as an attempt to replace human decision-making altogether.

As a result, the conversation is more grounded. AI is being increasingly understood as an augmentation layer that must operate within clearly defined guardrails.

Architecture and visibility shaped outcomes

One of the quieter but most consequential lessons from 2025 was the role of architecture in resilience outcomes. Applications are distributed, users are mobile, and identity has become the primary control plane.

Security controls that sit outside the network struggle to deliver the visibility and speed required. Attacks don’t respect tool boundaries. They move wherever identity, network, or cloud visibility are weakest.

Organisations that aligned networking and security more closely were better positioned to detect anomalous behaviour early and respond with confidence. This was less about adopting a specific framework, and more about reducing fragmentation and blind spots.

Architecture decisions will now increasingly be recognised as security decisions. Visibility, policy enforcement, and response speed are now tightly coupled to how environments are designed and operated.

What this means going forward

If 2025 was the year resilience was tested, 2026 will be the year it’s measured.

Boards and executives will ask harder questions about preparedness, rather than just focusing on coverage. CISOs will be expected to demonstrate how attacks are prevented and how incidents are handled when prevention fails. Security leaders will need to articulate how their operating models scale sustainably under intense pressure.

The organisations that succeed will be those that stop treating resilience as a set of controls. They need to treat it as a capability that spans people, process, technology, and partnerships.

Cyber resilience is no longer about stopping every attack. It’s about responding with clarity when one succeeds.

Security hasn’t become an impossible task. It’s just become more honest. Noise is easy to generate, and signal is hard to find. Resilience is built long before an incident ever occurs.

Which organisations will be rewarded? It’ll be the ones that have learned the lesson and acted on it.

To see these insights in more detail, read the full breakdown in Gamma Communications’ Cyber Resilience Report: Cyber Resilience for UK Enterprises – Gamma

Dropbox and ALSO have expanded their partnership to the UK through the ALSO Cloud Marketplace, adding the market to a wider rollout across six additional EMEA countries.

UK resellers can now sell the full Dropbox portfolio through the marketplace, including core file storage and collaboration products, Dropbox Sign, Replay and Dropbox Dash. The arrangement includes local billing, support and partner enablement.

The expansion builds on momentum in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and the Nordic region. Alongside the UK, the broader rollout covers France, Spain, Portugal, Benelux and Italy.

For channel partners, the agreement expands the range of Dropbox products available through a single procurement route. It also gives ALSO a broader software and productivity portfolio in markets where distributors and cloud marketplaces are competing for reseller attention.

Partner Support

Support for partners in the newly added markets includes attractive margins and performance-based incentives, tailored onboarding programmes, multilingual sales, marketing and technical support, market development funds and partner community programmes.

The aim is to help resellers sell more to existing customers while expanding into adjacent areas such as workflow tools and AI-based productivity software. This reflects a wider shift in the channel, as distributors seek to package collaboration, document handling and search tools together rather than sell storage products in isolation.

Through ALSO, Dropbox is offering its main collaboration and content products as well as newer workflow and search tools. The company describes Dash as a context-aware AI product that connects across work applications to help users find content more quickly.

ALSO, which describes itself as Europe’s largest technology provider for the ICT sector, brings a large reseller network to the partnership. Its ecosystem has a potential reach of more than 140,000 resellers and spans hardware, software and IT services from more than 800 vendors.

That scale matters in the UK market, where software vendors continue to rely on distributors and marketplaces to reach small and mid-sized business customers through managed service providers and resellers. A marketplace model can simplify billing and provisioning while reducing the number of separate vendor relationships partners need to manage.

Artjoms Krūmiņš, Group Lead CoC Software & Cybersecurity at ALSO, commented on the broader rollout: “We are pleased to further strengthen our strategic partnership with Dropbox by extending our collaboration into additional regions. Building on a strong foundation, this expansion broadens our market reach, strengthens ALSO’s portfolio and further enhances the value we deliver to partners and customers across EMEA.

“Together with Dropbox, we are well positioned to support the evolving needs of the market and help partners capture new growth opportunities.”

Channel Focus

Dropbox framed the agreement as part of its channel strategy, focused on giving partners more products to take into customer accounts. The company has been working to expand beyond file synchronisation and sharing into search, e-signature and workflow tools.

David Keogh, Global Head of Channel at Dropbox, said the latest expansion is intended to create more routes to revenue for partners. “This expansion with ALSO is an important step for our partner ecosystem. By combining ALSO’s reach with Dropbox’s portfolio, we’re opening up new opportunities for partners to grow, build new revenue streams, and deliver more value to customers.

“Customers benefit from secure, productivity-focused solutions that are increasingly powered by AI to help teams work more efficiently. Together, this is a strategic partnership built to scale and support long-term growth across the channel.

“Partners are looking for practical solutions they can introduce into existing customer environments. With products like Dash, we’re supporting resellers looking to expand beyond storage and collaboration into AI-powered productivity, creating new opportunities for growth.”