About a-team Marketing Services
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry

A-Team Insight Blogs

Bank of England: Machine Learning set to Double in Financial Services

Subscribe to our newsletter

The Bank of England and the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) have published a new report on ‘Machine Learning in UK Financial Services’ that predicts live machine learning (ML) applications will more than double within the next three years.

The report is the result of a joint 2019 survey between the two regulators covering over 300 firms including banks, credit brokers, e-money institutions, financial market infrastructure firms, investment managers, insurers, non-bank lenders and principal trading firms.

It found that in recent years, improved software and hardware as well as increasing volumes of data have accelerated the pace of ML development.

In many cases, development has passed the initial development phase, and is entering more mature stages of deployment. According to the survey, a third of ML applications are used for a considerable share of activities in a specific business area, while deployment is most advanced in the banking and insurance sectors.

“From front-office to back-office, ML is now used across a range of business areas,” confirms the report. “ML is most commonly used in anti-money laundering (AML) and fraud detection as well as in customer-facing applications (eg customer services and marketing). Some firms also use ML in areas such as credit risk management, trade pricing and execution, as well as general insurance pricing and underwriting.”

Although regulation is not seen as an unjustified barrier to ML deployment, some firms do stress the need for additional guidance on how to interpret current regulation. The biggest reported constraints are in fact internal to firms, such as legacy IT systems and data limitations. However, additional guidance around how to interpret current regulation could serve as an enabler for ML deployment.

The regulators plan to establish a public-private group to further explore some of the questions and technical areas raised.

Subscribe to our newsletter

Related content

WEBINAR

Recorded Webinar: Best practices for eComms and multi-channel surveillance

Surveillance of multi-channel communications is a moving target as financial institutions continue to add conversational streams, in many cases mobile applications previously banned from the trading environment. With more eComms channels comes more data that must be managed, retained, and ready for regulatory compliance. For many firms, the changing shape of surveillance is a complex...

BLOG

Now is the Time to Prepare for January 2025 DORA Compliance Deadline

Rich Cooper, Global Head of Financial Service Go-To-Market at Fusion Risk Management. The Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA), which is designed to consolidate and upgrade Information and Communications Technology (ICT) risk requirements and sets out a common set of standards for mitigating risks, takes effect across the EU in January 2025. The legislation covers a...

EVENT

Data Management Summit London

Now in its 14th year, the Data Management Summit (DMS) in London brings together the European capital markets enterprise data management community, to explore how data strategy is evolving to drive business outcomes and speed to market in changing times.

GUIDE

Entity Data Management Handbook – Third Edition

Welcome to the third edition of the Entity Data Management Handbook which is available for free download. In this updated edition we delve into the role entity data plays in the smooth running of financial institutions and capital markets, the challenges of attaining high quality data, and various aspects, approaches and technologies involved in managing...