Today marks the final day of the SupTech Lab at the University of Cambridge.
The Cambridge SupTech Lan was created to go deeper into questions we had already begun exploring through the RegTech for Regulators Accelerator (R2A) and earlier work at Digital Transformation Solutions (DTS): how can financial authorities meaningfully evolve in a digital world? And, crucially, what does change management actually look like when the goal is to move from promising pilots to solutions that scale – across departments, mandates, and countries?
Scalability was the real frontier of our work. Not whether something worked once, with the right people in the room, under ideal conditions – but whether it could be repeated, institutionalised, maintained, and improved over time. Whether it could survive staff turnover, budget cycles, procurement rules, and legacy IT. Whether it could move from one authority to many without starting from scratch every time. That is where we focused our energy at the Lab.
From concept to practice
Over the last ten years, through R2A and the Lab, we helped move suptech from concept to practice – and, in some cases, into routine supervision:
- Supporting supervisors across continents in building live suptech applications embedded in day-to-day supervisory workflows.
- Contributing to a shared global evidence base on data governance, AI use, cloud adoption, and institutional operating models – grounded in what authorities were actually doing.
- Empowering innovation leaders inside institutions, and creating a neutral environment where regulators, technologists, donors, academics, vendors, and practitioners could work together.
- Demonstrating, repeatedly, that innovation in the public sector is about capabilities, governance, and trust, supported by fit-for-purpose tools and methodologies.
Overall, this journey showed us that digital transformation in supervision works when institutions are treated not as “users”, but as co-designers and system owners. That insight has shaped everything that follows.
Why it is time to move on
Some of the constraints that made our venture at Cambridge credible also limit what it can do next. Academic structures, project-based donor funding, and limited productisation aren’t fit for the scale of transformation public institutions are now asking for. Authorities are no longer experimenting at the margins. They are trying to rewire how they operate.
At the same time, both demand and opportunity have widened. After two decades working across the financial-sector ecosystem – from supervisory and regulatory innovation, to market and product development, to start-up acceleration – one thing has become unmistakably clear: the challenges we tackled through suptech are not unique to financial authorities. They exist across the public sector. And the stakes are higher than efficiency.
Strong, capable, digitally enabled public institutions are now directly linked to the resilience of democracies. Citizens, businesses, and public servants are demanding better governance – faster, fairer, more transparent, and more accountable – at federal, state, and local levels.
Across governments, innovators are no longer asking whether to digitalise. They are asking how to do it coherently, sustainably, and across the whole organisation. Our mission has always been to empower those innovation leaders. That mission continues.
And our work on suptech has outgrown its original boundaries. The challenge we are taking on now is end-to-end public-sector digital transformation – across strategy, people, processes, data, and technology; across agencies; and across geographies.
From a Lab to an operating system for public sector transformation
This transition marks a shift from a Lab to an operating platform.
Digital Transformation Solutions is being reshaped from an implementation vehicle for the Lab into a company that can structurally build, operate, and scale digital infrastructure for public institutions.
At the centre of this is GovSpace.
GovSpace – launched in beta on 8 December during SupTech Week – is being built as a digital operating environment for public agencies to:
- diagnose their digital maturity,
- design credible transformation roadmaps,
- execute change across silos,
- and learn continuously from data and peers.
We are not leaving the suptech space. We are placing it where it belongs – as one use case within a broader govtech architecture, alongside:
- sovereign technology and digital sovereignty,
- public financial management (PFM) and budget execution,
- digital public infrastructure (DPI),
- service delivery and citizen engagement,
- climate, resilience, and sustainability governance.
And beyond.
This is the ambitious evolution of our work.
Gratitude – and continuity
The Lab exists because of the trust of hundreds of public servants, partners, funders, researchers, and technologists who believed that better institutions are possible. That trust does not end today: the knowledge, evidence, and relationships forged through R2A and the Lab carry forward – embedded in the new form our work is taking, with far greater capacity to scale.
What changes is the ambition: from proving that digital transformation can work, to ensuring that it actually does – at institutional and system level, with deeper and more durable outcomes.
Looking ahead
Closing the SupTech Lab at Cambridge makes space for DTS and GovSpace to do work that is more durable, more operationally fit, and more aligned with what public-sector transformation really requires.
The work continues – with sharper tools, clearer incentives, a wider mandate, and the same team, now augmented by product experts.
Today, we celebrate the accomplishments of the Lab, the relationships formed through it, and the opportunity for growing impact – from suptech to govtech, and from experimentation to full execution.
At DTS, and through GovSpace, we look forward to continuing the journey together.
Simone and Matt
Co-Founders and Co-Heads, Cambridge SupTech Lab
Co-Founders, CEO and CTO, Digital Transformation Solutions & GovSpace
