Introduction
The project brings together academics and regulators to investigate the landscape of three emerging technologies AI, Web3 and Quantum technologies and their impact on the financial services industry.
The project aims to tackle the two of the Finance and economics programme missions including:
- To operationalise Responsible AI Principles and AI Audit in order to fully realise the transformational benefits of the adoption of AI across the financial services industry and the economy as a whole.
- To enable a more inclusive, secure, resilient and inclusive digital economy through Web3 technology and tokenomics design.
Explaining the science
Our activity has also been influenced by discussions with the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) Emerging Technology Research Hub (https://www.fca.org.uk/firms/emerging-technology-research-hub) who have identified three ‘technologies of interest’ where they require additional understanding (AI, Web3 and Quantum Technologies) complementing existing work in PETs and Synthetic Data Generation. Researchers from The Alan Turing Institute and collaborating universities work together with the FCA to further understand three technologies of interest. This was also an opportunity for the FCA to collaborate in a secondment format with The Alan Turing Institute and develop new skills.
Web 3.0 is a reconceptualisation of the Internet with a move to new architectures, data flows and technologies. This decentralised system requires new and emerging models of AI to drive an efficient and effective digital economy. However, given the unprecedented connectivity and volume and variety of data, it is vital that the AI developed and deployed is responsible.
Quantum Technology: A 2021 paper from Future Lab for Applied Research and Engineering, stated that “Finance, in particular, is estimated to be the first industry sector to benefit from quantum computing not only in the medium and long terms, but even in the short term due to the large number of financial use cases that lend themselves to quantum computing and their amenability to be solved effectively even in the presence of approximations”.
Project aims
- Understand the responsible use of AI in the context of these new areas, and the regulatory challenges they represent.
- Leverage our existing work and relationships to understand the current work and future directions and challenges in this space.
- Understand the role of responsible AI in these embryonic fields.
- We will achieve this by bringing together regulators and academics to deliver a report outlining the state of the art, challenges to be addressed and possible research directions within each area.
- The project will further strengthen our relationship with UK financial regulators and provide first-hand information about the potential gaps in research that need to be addressed for AI, Web3 and Quantum technologies to be adopted within industry.
Applications
The outcome of the project will benefit:
- Industry, by providing an overview of the current and emerging landscape, developing use cases and potential areas of opportunity and risk.
- The academic community, by outlining and establish the socio-technical research challenges that will arise from these new technologies.
- Government and regulators, by summarising the areas that require consideration for the regulation of systems that may utilise these technologies.
Organisers
Cat Morton
Senior Programme Manager, Finance and Economics
Monica Vakil-Dewar
Research Project Manager, Environment & Sustainability Grand ChallengeCollaborators
