Table of Contents

Controlling Technology in Finance: World Methods for the Electronic Age




Opening Remarks by Deputy Running Director Bo Li




November 10, 2021















Excellent early morning. I hope you are all healthy and very well. It is a great enjoyment to welcome you to this very topical panel discussion on “Managing Technological innovation in Finance: World-wide Methods for the Digital Age.” I am joined by a panel of eminent professionals who will give further insights into the problems.
Technological improve has extensive been a driver of human progress. And the fiscal sector has been no exception. From the growth of double-entry book-retaining, to the introduction of ATMs and contemporary payment systems—each wave of innovation has left its mark.
The electronic age has accelerated these tendencies:
- Detailed knowledge on our pursuits, transactions, and behaviors are now staying captured in huge quantities as the Online Of Issues and cell connectivity have exploded all around the world.
- Big improves in computing energy utilized to this facts are generating Artificial Intelligence—or “AI”—less of a Hollywood movie fantasy. And, more and more, AI systems conduct tasks that commonly call for human intelligence.
- Meanwhile, the information is crammed with tales of the latest hack of laptop units and ensuing loss of company and personal info.
These traits are intertwined technologically, but we are only commencing to have an understanding of many of the challenges. From the viewpoint of financial regulators, the important problem is how to enjoy the benefits of technological know-how in terms of money inclusion, performance, possibility administration, and oversight, whilst simultaneously handling the money security and integrity pitfalls.
In 3 independent and new papers, IMF team have uncovered powerful complementarities across these troubles. They level to the will need for adapting policy approaches and regulation to these new problems, and to the need to have for enhanced cross-border cooperation to address dangers that do not have national boundaries. Shortly, we will explore these topics further with the panel these days, but enable me now emphasize briefly the findings from these 3 workstreams.
Very first, on the electronic economic climate and facts.
In today’s digital age, data has become a important, globally transportable superior. But shifting it across borders necessitates nations to have coherent procedures that construct believe in. Without the need of world wide ideas for controlling facts, we could facial area deepening digital fault strains involving nations, as enormous details pools turn into significantly isolated. This would be specifically expensive for more compact and reduce-cash flow international locations. The good matter is that not too long ago G7 international locations have introduced some important principles for cross-border motion of info, and that is a pretty good begin.
Our knowledge can electricity open up finance and AI that can make societies extra effective, driving progress, employment, and finance. But there are also dim sides. Knowledge can be captured without the need of our efficient consent by large platforms—creating new monopolies and stability threats, and posing difficulties to nations around the world to stability individual privateness with requires to defend info from cyber assaults.
These challenges have important implications for expansion, balance, and the intercontinental process, which are at the core of the IMF’s mandate and usually means world cooperation is wanted to address them. Nowadays, our panel will go over how policymakers can deal with crucial problems all around info and the digital economic climate that span economic steadiness and inclusion, level of competition, and privacy.
Next, on AI and equipment learning.
The adoption of these technologies in the fiscal sector has accelerated in new many years and is now far reaching. Fast adoption of AI and equipment finding out in finance can maximize effectiveness, enhance the customer working experience, and strengthen possibility administration. They also ability the tools utilised by regulators to strengthen prudential oversight and help the implementation of monetary and macroprudential insurance policies. Feel of extra economical source chains, or lending to beforehand unbanked compact firms around the environment.
But these systems also carry hazards, which include from opacity, bias, and the scope for new resources of systemic threat, such as from increased interconnectedness. Policymakers will need to have to confront these challenges as they think about opportunity regulatory strategies. And, as we will examine soon, the full extent of the strengths and weaknesses affiliated with these systems is nevertheless to be wholly recognized.
Third, on cyber possibility.
The profusion of knowledge and electronic platforms that link the world has also amplified chances for malicious cyber hackers to disrupt sectors that depend on digital methods. One particular of the unwanted results of the new digital economy and developments in technological know-how is that it widens the attack surface, specifically within the economical sector, which is at the forefront of info technology as effectively as engineering adoption.
In the current earlier, provide chain assaults and ransomware assaults have strike the headlines a lot more routinely. Thus, it is not stunning that cyber risk is a single of the topmost worries of governments, organizations, and individuals. In the money sector, info confidentiality and integrity as well as the easy performing of facts methods, are consistently threatened by cyber attackers. This generates a menace to economic stability—and is a single that requires notice. Economic methods are at various states of readiness to regulate this kind of assaults, and the intercontinental response is fragmented. Our panel dialogue will protect the latest IMF investigation in this location, which has recognized significant gaps that, if dealt with, could considerably lower cyber threat, and assistance safeguard international economical steadiness.
All round, technological improvements in finance should really be broadly welcome, together with preparations to seize their rewards and mitigate prospective pitfalls to the financial system’s integrity and basic safety. But numerous actions are essential to fortify domestic and intercontinental coverage frameworks on knowledge, artificial intelligence, and cybersecurity to promote cooperation amid nations around the world and regulators, and to establish ability.
I seem ahead to talking about these challenges with our distinguished panel today.


IMF Communications Office
MEDIA RELATIONS
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