ISLAMABAD: The Securities and Exchange Commission of Pakistan (SECP) will be accepting applications for testing in the Regulatory Sandbox from May 2, the commission said on Saturday.

The application submission window will remain open until May 31.

The Regulatory Sandbox, now successfully entering its fourth cohort, provides a tailored regulatory environment that allows entities to conduct limited-scale live tests of innovative products, services, processes and business models in a controlled and supervised environment.

The upcoming fourth cohort is divided into two segments: Islamic finance and conventional finance. In the Islamic finance segment, ideas related to Shariah-com­pliant digital finance (e.g. crowdsourced fin­ance, liquidity management solutions, micro- and nano-finance), Sha­riah-compliant products (e.g. small-ticket savings and sukuk fractionalisation), new takaful models and digital intermediation in regulated Islamic financial services will be preferred.

In the conventional finance segment, the SECP will give preference to the ideas related to robo-advisory, AI-b­ased automated fund management, asset fractionalisation and single-window lending platform.

Published in Dawn, April 30th, 2023