Why AI matters to banks
Artificial intelligence offers real opportunities for the banking sector, from enhancing customer experience and expanding access to financial services to strengthening risk management, cybersecurity and fraud prevention. Banks have invested continuously in developing and applying AI, and the technology now plays an integral role across a growing range of banking activities. As AI continues to evolve rapidly, ensuring that this innovation is matched by trust, safety and accountability is essential to protecting customers and the wider financial system.
Realising AI's potential responsibly is not something banks can achieve alone. It requires a regulatory environment that promotes innovation and legal certainty while maintaining a high level of consumer protection, together with ongoing dialogue between banks, supervisors and regulators to ensure consistency across Europe and across sectors. By engaging in this dialogue and contributing to the development of EU AI policy, the banking sector can help ensure that AI is deployed safely and fairly, to the benefit of European citizens and businesses.
EBF position paper on AI in the banking industry
At the European Banking Federation, we believe that AI provides great opportunities to enhance customer experience, democratize financial services, improve cybersecurity and consumer protection and strengthen risk management. Banks continue to invest in research and development of AI applications and the technology has come to play an integral role in a range of activities. As AI is an evolving technology, there is a need to ensure that the regulatory environment is fit for the use of AI by promoting innovation and legal certainty and maintaining a high level of consumer protection is paramount. Fostering a broad dialogue between all relevant supervisors and regulators on AI developments and their impact is a key priority for the banking sector and should be encouraged to ensure consistency and alignment across Europe and across sectors.
The EBF continues to contribute to the work of the European Commission’s High-Level Expert Group on AI, which looks to support the implementation of the European Strategy on AI.
Artificial Intelligence – A European Approach to excellence and Trust
Artificial Intelligence presents opportunities to increase prosperity and growth in Europe and is a key element for the development of the digital economy. On 19 February, the European Commission published its White Paper on ‘Artificial Intelligence – A European Approach to excellence and Trust’, setting out a two-pronged approach to accelerate the deployment of AI in Europe. The first pillar focuses on building an ecosystem of excellence through supporting the research and innovation community, developing skills, partnership with the private sector, and securing access to data and computing infrastructures, among other actions. The second pillar, building an ecosystem of trust, puts forward proposals for a framework on human centric AI.
AI for security purposes: fraud prevention
AI is providing great assistance in the detection of fraud and other suspicious activities that are linked to financial crime generally. Banks traditionally divide fraud into two main categories: external (e.g., attacks on the bank or its clients related to money transfer, identity fraud, online payments, etc.) and internal fraud (e.g., malevolent actions from employees).
A Fraud Detection System (FDS) copes with such threats through feature engineering, supervised, unsupervised, and adaptive learning, by collecting transactional data, analysing it and learning from it, or through the interaction with FDS maintainers. It is able to identify suspicious events and limit fraudulent activities by suspending or blocking said activities. Fraud prevention proves to be even more efficient when customer profiles are created.
EBF member of the European Commission High-Level Expert Group on AI
As the voice of the European banking sector, the EBF has been accepted as a member of the European Commission newly established High-Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence (AI HLG).
The AI HLEG has the general objective to support the implementation of the European strategy on AI. It will notably produce draft AI Ethics Guidelines. It will also advise the Commission on next steps addressing AI-related mid to long-term challenges and opportunities through recommendations.
