UK SaaS Market Size and Forecast by Offering, Deployment Model, Organization Size, Subscription Model, and End User Industry: 2019-2033

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Industry Assessment Overview

Industry Findings: Increased statutory regulation of online harms and a new digital competition regime have altered procurement expectations for SaaS providers selling into public services and consumer platforms in the country. The Online Safety Act received Royal Assent in Oct-2023 and Ofcom’s phased implementation has pushed platform risk assessments and content-moderation obligations into procurement scorecards; buyers now include specific compliance checkpoints for moderation controls, age-assurance, and evidence of regulatory reporting processes. That shift forced product teams to surface audit logs and policy-configurable moderation settings inside multi-tenant stacks, and it pushed compliance and procurement functions to favour vendors that can prove operational traceability and rapid incident-handling; these capabilities now sit near the top of shortlist criteria for public-sector and consumer-facing deals.

Industry Player Insights: UK’s market performance is influenced by Sage, Thought Machine, Darktrace, and Ocado etc. Our assessment points to UK-headquartered vendors productising AI and sovereign-cloud playbooks to win regulated buyers. Sage announced and began rolling out Sage Copilot at its Transform event in Feb-2024, embedding generative assistants across accounting and payroll flows to automate routine finance tasks and lifting expectations among SMEs for embedded, data-protected automation; that spurred competing vendors to accelerate secure, tenant-isolated AI rollouts. Thought Machine expanded banking cloud deployments in Sep-2024 for challenger and specialist banks, which validated core-banking-as-a-service models and prompted incumbents to re-evaluate legacy cores in favour of API-first platforms that reduce time-to-market for digital products.