Amsterdam: Fintech executives express concerns about increasing reliance on AI

Fintech executives are concerned about the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) increasing banks' reliance on the big US tech firms. At a gathering in Amsterdam last week, some executives suggested that the sector will increasingly have to turn to the likes of Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Microsoft Azure to develop and use AI technologies.

ING's chief analytics officer, Bahadir Yilmaz, said: "You will always need them because sometimes the machine power that is needed for these technologies is huge. It's also not really feasible for a bank to build this tech," adding that this dependency is "one of the biggest risks" and could see banks experiencing "vendor lock-in."

Joanne Hannaford, CIO of Deutsche Bank's corporate bank, added: "AI requires huge amounts of compute and really the only way that you're going to be able to access that compute sensibly is from Big Tech."

Acting Comptroller of the Currency Michael Hsu spoke at the Financial Stability Oversight Council's AI Conference on Thursday about the importance of shared responsibility between banks and big tech. He said: “From a financial stability perspective, AI holds promise and peril from its use as a tool and as a weapon. The controls and defenses needed to mitigate those risks vary depending on how AI is being used. At a high level, though, I believe having clear gates and a shared responsibility model for AI safety can help.”