Following the Treasury Select Committee’s request to the largest providers of AI to the UK financial services sector for information on their services and their thoughts on service provision, it has now published the responses it received. Interesting comments from the responses include:
- AWS currently sees the most AI use in chatbots and virtual assistants, document processing, onboarding, loan assessments, risk management and market analysis and market analysis. It sees the next few years including Specialised Language Models being developed for specific tasks with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems that reference knowledge bases outside their training sources better supporting information management and compliance. It also sees AI agents integrating with existing financial systems to enhance portfolio management and quantitative trading capabilities;
- Anthropic noted in particular its launch of “Claude for Financial Services” which connects financial institutions with their data providers for AI-powered analysis, while keeping checkpoints the maintain humans in the loop;
- Google is seeing the most use of AI in AML, customer chatbots, risk management and predictive analysis and innovation and access;
- Microsoft provided details of a number of firms that have used AI for various purposes including for improvement of customer services and communications;
- Meta says it has no specific financial services strategy;
- the providers recognise the importance of resilience and have various structures in place to provide multiple layers of protection, including geographic distribution of data centres; and
- the biggest providers expect to become designated Critical Third Parties and support the regime, but caution against regulatory duplication with existing oversight, while some smaller ones or ones that do not consider their focus to be on financial institutions are not expecting to be designated.