‘The reality is: this is happening’: Government tech expert Lord Holmes on building a better state

As GGF’s sister title Global Government Fintech becomes Global Government Finance, Lord Holmes – a long-standing advocate for public sector fintech use – endorses a ‘timely move’ as governments transform and modernise public sector finance operations and delivery

Lord (Chris) Holmes is a man on a mission to help governments innovate using technology for the public good.

Easily recognisable as he approaches our rendezvous near St James’s Park station in London accompanied by his guide-dog, we are meeting to discuss his efforts to elevate the profile of financial technologies in the UK parliament – and beyond – as Global Government Fintech becomes Global Government Finance.

Our hour-long interview, which ranges across topics including artificial intelligence, blockchain, digital ID and open banking, is underpinned by two interwoven threads.

First, his passionate belief in the “extraordinary enabling and empowering potential” of technology for the public good.

Second, his personal story. He went blind almost overnight, unexpectedly, aged 14; won a record-breaking six gold medals in swimming at the Barcelona Paralympics in 1992; was director of paralympic integration for the hugely successful London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games; and was appointed to the House of Lords as a Conservative peer the following year.

“All technology needs to be conceived of as assistive technology,” he urges during our discussion. “If technology’s not assistive, what’s it doing, really?”

A fair thought as public finance leaders across the world increasingly ask: how can we, and the public, most benefit from transforming what we do, and what we provide to citizens?

Read more: Global Government Fintech becomes Global Government Finance

‘Timely’ evolution

Global Government Fintech’s evolution – more than five years after launching to tap into the rapidly expanding reach of digital finance – into Global Government Finance kicks off the conversation.

“To reframe your publication is timely in that ‘fintech’ was a really useful and helpful handle at that stage [2020] for describing a whole bunch of technologies and opportunities and potential use cases around this,” Holmes says. “I think it’s positive now to move on and talk “finance” because the reality is: this is happening.”

“If you look across the private sector in the UK and around the world, this [use of technology] is more than happening,” he continues. Government must also approach utilising technology as a mission.

Without this, the public sector could fall behind the private sector, leaving “huge swathes of the citizenry unnecessarily shut out from all of the opportunities and all the potential benefit”, he says.

“This is as much for every layer of government and arms-length bodies, executive agencies, local authorities around the world, as it is for central government, to consider what use cases – actually, more than use cases, more than proof cases, what value cases there are,” he says.

‘Enablers to address real challenges’

The 54-year-old’s passion for the potential of transforming government finance using technology must sit against day-to-day realities, however.

Why – indeed, how – can many public sector finance leaders justify spending time trying to understand the possibilities of (say) blockchain when typically (at a national level) they are being asked to find substantial cost savings or (at a local level) have to find money for social care and fixing potholes amid an often precarious financial situation?

Holmes gave a speech six months ago in London’s Canary Wharf acknowledging that the challenges faced by all governments (in his words then, ranging from wars and populism to the “looming tower of stagflation”) meant that you could understand “a response from governments, thinking ‘we just hunker down, we go back to first principles of government, and we don’t go near these things that are seen as – from their perspective – risky, novel, nothing to do with delivering citizens, companies, cities, for our country’.

“But the way the narrative needs to be got into is: the whole point of these technologies, these financial products, is that they’re not something separate, they’re not something ‘over there’ in a vertical called ‘technology’. They are potentially… your new powerful tools, your enablers to address so many of the real challenges that you’re facing,” he argues.

“So, for public sector finance leaders, it’s not about ‘I haven’t got time to consider this right now’. It is: ‘I have to have time to look and consider this, because these are – in human hands, human-led, with human values at the fore – the means to address these problems’. Much more than additional resource, which there isn’t anyway, it’s these technologies that afford us the opportunity to really address these challenges,” he continues.

“Fundamentally, if we get into the big vision and mission, it’s that sense of being able to really ‘do the state’ in a better way,” he says. “That doesn’t mean necessarily ‘smaller state’ or ‘lesser state’, it means doing it in a fundamentally different way, changing that most fundamental relationship between citizen and state through human leadership on these technologies.”

Read more: “There’s a case for stablecoins across all government departments…”

Kalifa Review four years on

It is almost four years since the publication of the HM Treasury-commissioned ‘Fintech Strategic Review’ into ways to boost the UK’s fintech sector (February 2021). The review was led by Ron Kalifa OBE, a former chief executive of international payment processing company Worldpay, and addressed three objectives: ensuring UK fintech has ‘the resources to grow and succeed’; encouraging ‘widespread adoption of fintech solutions’; and ‘maintaining and advancing the UK’s international reputation’.

Mentions of government procurement – both in terms of the potential benefits for government operations (and the taxpayer) and the potential benefits for a fintech provider winning a government contract – were conspicuous by their absence. The UK’s HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) had instigated a procurement for open banking technology in 2020 and duly introduced an open banking-powered online payment option for taxpayers – believed to be the first time any government worldwide has used open banking to facilitate tax payments – in March 2021.

Read more: How can open banking be useful to governments and the public sector?

“I think it was a good piece of work at that time,” Holmes reflects on what became known as the ‘Kalifa Report’ (Holmes himself inputted to parts of the review related to regulation).

“Now there’s a clear need to have a refocus and perhaps a broader focus for elements that were less covered in that report,” he says.

“Whether you choose to call it ‘digital government’, whether you choose to call it ‘government technology’, it doesn’t much matter, because really what we’re talking about is how we can do government, how we can do public sector connectivity, as well as delivery, in a fundamentally…” – he pauses. “Transformation gets used so much in so many different situations where transformation certainly isn’t what’s happening, but here, this could be real, sustainable, meaningful transformation if the scale of the opportunity is clearly set out, understood, ‘value cased’ and then delivered to.”

Read more: Fintech has ‘almost infinite’ potential for governments: Lord Holmes

‘Extraordinary opportunity’ for public sector

Holmes himself authored a report in 2017 titled ‘Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) for Public Good: leadership, collaboration and innovation‘.

The analysis noted that (‘based on matching public policy delivery challenges facing government with the traceability and accountability and other capabilities offered by DLT’) areas of opportunity for the UK included (within the finance realm alone): taxation and benefits payments; privacy, cybersecurity and counter‐fraud; and public procurement, visibility of spending and asset traceability.

Approaching a decade on from his report, and four years since Kalifa – not to mention the fact that technologies themselves have developed and real use cases (in the UK and globally) multiplied during that time – there is an opportunity for the government to assess how to use tech to help modernise public sector finance-related operations and services.

“Firstly, there’s self-evidently, a gap – a gaping gap, if you can have such a thing [in using technology to achieve such modernisation],” Holmes responds, nodding. “And in a gap, there’s always an opportunity.”

“It’s one of the main reasons why I wrote the 2017 report as ‘DLT for public good’ because, at the time, there was a lot of chat and hype around [cryptocurrency] Bitcoin and other elements of it, [and] there was very little, if anything, of a sense of ‘there’s an extraordinary opportunity for the public sector, and through that the public’, through these technologies,” he explains.

“Eight or nine years later, so much of that still remains pressingly pertinent,” he says.

‘Potential needing to be realised’

“The reality is, we need to do much more than simply wave a banner for things that are wrongly all too often thought of and described as boring,” Holmes continues. “Government procurement, supply chain, audit – all of these things have such extraordinary possibilities to more than help. But they’re not seen in that context.”

This echoes an observation made by Ez Britton, the-then chief executive of the Centre for Finance, Innovation and Technology (CFIT) – an entity whose creation was actually recommended by the Kalifa Review – during a fireside chat at Global Government Fintech Lab 2023, when he observed that government can “directly” help grow the fintech sector through procurement.

But Global Government Finance’s own focus is primarily on the opportunity for governments to use technology to improve their own operations and delivery.  

Holmes speaks of “potential needing to be realised.”

“It goes back to things as simple as: don’t just say you’re going to enable SMEs [small- and medium-sized enterprises] to be part of procurement, make it a reality,” he says. “When we had crises such as COVID, so many of our fintech companies were queuing up to help on a pro bono basis and yet [they faced] that same sort of argument of ‘look, we’ve got an extraordinary crisis on our hands, we can’t possibly deal with you at the moment’.

“But they held potentially some of the solutions, for example, of getting money to people in most need, in most isolation, in an effective, efficient, safe, secure, privacy-ensuring, fraud-eradicating manner, and yet the state was wholly incapable of engaging with those entities that had potentially so many of the solutions and, would I suggest, have prevented at least some of the issues post-COVID that we have today [in terms of investigations linked to fraud].”

‘Getting the narrative right’

This brings us to the challenge of communicating public sector use of technology to the public.

Holmes speaks of the “critical importance of getting the narrative right and then taking the time to communicate that narrative and to properly engage and get public debate and public understanding around all of these opportunities”.

The focus, he says, should be on “enabling people to ask ‘what’s in this for me?’ because if you don’t enable that, then people understandably – be they people who are putting these [public procurement] tenders together or members of the general public – will just go, ‘that’s not anything to do with me’.”

Messaging and indeed brand is a very live concern among advocates of open banking (whether in the public or private sectors). It is now more than two years since a ‘dynamic purchasing system’ was instigated by the Crown Commercial Service (CCS) to become a ‘vehicle’ for central government and the public sector to source open banking services (with the ultimate aim of “reducing the costs of receiving money into public sector organisations, as well as reducing fraud”).

HMRC’s online button for making tax payments using open banking technology is labelled pay by bank account as opposed to pay by open banking.

“Brand is critically important and [the name] open banking is one of the difficulties facing open banking,” Holmes says. “It’s a terrible brand, it doesn’t mean anything. Traditional finance is shutting branches. So people go: ‘Well, you say ‘open banking’ but my branch has closed’ or ‘I don’t want it to be open, that’s all my private, personal stuff’.”  

“The way forward is to put all of the discussion in the value cases, because people, in a sense, don’t need to understand open banking,” he continues. “So [ask]: ‘Would you like a better service – a less clunky, more connected experience in X, Y or Z part of your finances?’. Then you’ve got the hook, then you can have the conversation.”

“Government has a unique convening power,” he continues. “No-one else does that and, if they choose, I suggest they must use that power around all of these opportunities to convene, to connect, to communicate. That’s where it starts to make a difference.”

Another example Holmes cites is the potential to use technology to improve government consultations. “Imagine how you can transform that by being able to do it on a mass scale with an ability to assess the consultation responses in real time through deploying these technologies [and] have an interactive relationship with the citizens and businesses who you’re consulting with. That will be transformational.”

Digital ID: ‘difficult issue’

Our interview naturally moves at this point onto the topic of digital identity.

“Digital ID is a massive current example of this,” Holmes agrees, referencing the recent (September 2025) UK government announcement that a new digital ID scheme would be rolled out across UK. The announcement caused controversy, particularly with the proposed scheme being promoted as a way to curb the prospect of work for illegal migrants, a significant factor driving small boat crossings in the English Channel.

“It’s a difficult issue, particularly in the UK, with our history, heritage and values,” Holmes reflects.

The government’s decision to link digital ID so prominently to illegal migrants was “extraordinarily unhelpful”, he says. First, “because it’s erroneous – we already have the powers and the tools that we need to address that issue,” he says. Second, “by doing that, you just set back so much work that’s been done around digital identity”.

Could the government’s initial promotion of digital ID have actually caused more PR damage than benefit? “It’s extraordinarily unfortunate for an issue which is understandably highly charged in any event, to take that approach without having done any work on public engagement, public debate, public involvement,” he says, carefully.

“If we’re discussing any of these opportunities that are of themselves, obviously novel – so, have that element of the ‘shock of the new’ potentially, not specifically digital ID but digital ID is at one of the sharper ends of it – you need to put the effort in to engage the public and properly listen,” he continues.

“You need to look at principles around self-sovereign ID,” he says. “You need to absolutely not mandate it. You need to very much discuss all the issues around privacy, around how people can deploy their credentials and feel empowered rather than controlled by it. An obvious example is if you want to go and buy a pint, the barperson does not need to know anything about you except one credential [age]. They need to know that for that moment, in that place, for that purpose, for that specific time, you are legally entitled to buy a pint. So much of this is empowering the citizenry.”

‘Value cases’ and ‘tangibility’

Indeed, he focuses on the government making technological transformation “tangible for people”.

“So, you don’t have to talk about ‘crypto’ or ‘digital assets’ or ‘open banking’,” he says. “You go and look at what’s being done in the Department for Transport – what happens when you get onto your local bus service; what’s being done in the Department for Education – what’s being done with a passport that sets out special educational needs, and you only have to do that once, and it’s then immutable, secure, privacy-assured – that will go with that young person all the way through their learning experience,” he says.

And this will be ever more the case as more technologies are developed in future – and technologies like AI take off further.

“The government needs to think more, talk more and deliver more on things [such as] what they need to do in terms of sovereign AI – there’s a fair amount of chat on that,” he says. “But when you go into that: what does that mean for sovereign data? That’s a critical point. What does it mean in terms of data centres, the technologies within data centres, what does that mean for how that connects to not only the technologies, but the communities and the opportunities within that.”

Read more: UK government financial inclusion strategy nods to open banking and AI tools

So, what does ‘good’ look like for transformed, modern public finance?

“‘Good’ looks like a whole array of these technologies effectively, efficiently, economically deployed, so citizens, consumers, businesses – not least smaller, micro businesses – are really enabled to avail themselves and take advantage of the benefits and the technologies, and the names [technologies] melt into the background because they’re not needed and they’re not relevant, because it becomes how we interact with the state: how we get our refuse collected, how we run our payroll, how we do invoice financing, whatever it is. It becomes part of that in a really efficient, economical and positive manner,” he responds. “That’s entirely possible. But it’s a huge lift.”

Lived experience of technology

Our interview concludes with Holmes asked what drives him to associate with – indeed continue to advocate for – these topics in parliament and beyond.

“Because of the extraordinary enabling and empowering potential of this technology,” he responds.

“I wouldn’t have known this at the time, but when I lost my sight when I was 14, it was human-led technology that enabled me to carry on. I obviously had huge support from friends, family, teachers, swim coaches, etc. But alongside that, it was a very, very basic laptop with very basic speech-output software,” he says.

“I taught myself to touch-type,” he continues. “It was very, very basic technology that enabled me to go back to school, to do A-Levels, to get to Cambridge [University], and to do what I’ve done. I’m still using, obviously, a much more developed, sophisticated version of everything.”

“All these things, like talking about proof cases, use cases, value cases, all technology – assistive technology – I guess it comes from there, and that’s led me through everything I’ve done, through the law [degree], through London 2012… deploying assistive technology to deliver, to enable, to empower,” he says. “That’s why I think I’m in it.”

His answer neatly circles back to the start: a belief, forged through lived experience, that technology is not just a tool, but a powerful force for governments to use to drive transformation, innovation and inclusion.

This is a version of the interview with Lord Holmes published on the day that GGF’s sister title Global Government Fintech became Global Government Finance. Read the full version of the interview, which also discusses the use of technology to improve government procurement and processes and the potential of central bank digital currency, here: “The reality is: this is happening”: Lord Holmes as ‘government fintech’ evolves