Karmela Holtgreve

In keeping with Elevandi's commitment to developing innovation ecosystems, as considered at the Inclusive FinTech Forum and the recent report "Catalysing Disruptive Shifts for Innovation and Sustainability in Urban Environments".

More than 4 billion people can cast a vote in 2024. Two regional conflicts are jeopardising security and disrupting supply chains, with no resolution in sight. The East and the West are rising trade barriers. Against this background, how are multinationals to understand and adjust to the new normal, and where can technology help?
 
Operating under the theme of Manoeuvring Macro-geopolitical Dynamics, this roundtable will offer three constructs of the “new normal”: 
1. The death of the Brussels Effect: Europe has a history of exporting policy thought internationally, with changes like GDPR or the Basel framework for banking. Amid geopolitical divides, will this trend carry on in the regulation of digital finance and critical technologies?
2. Crisis is the new BAU: Defence, trade, health, and ecological catastrophes are becoming so frequent that corporates need to adjust to expect crises as part of their business-as-usual. How is this changing the markets for credit or insurance? What is the role of technology in this change?
3. It’s the era of economic insecurity: The US raised trade barriers to the import and export of capital and goods, especially linked to critical technologies. China, the EU and the UK are following suit, albeit with deviations. What can we expect from the race on economic security and what does it mean for cross-border businesses?

Attendees who wish to familiarise themselves with the topic may refer to the reference materials below.
- Driving innovation for a more inclusive future

President of France said ‘we are regulating things that we have not yet produced or invented. It is not a good idea.’ CEO of CB Insights echoed the thought ‘The EU now has more AI regulations than meaningful AI companies.’

The questions:
- The risk of a larger non-EU-based partner using its market power to pull high-potential EU-based AI startups out of the EU. Mistral-Ai proves that risk. Germany’s Aleph Alphi and UK-based Synthesia and StabilityAI too.
- Voluntary flight of startups to non-EU locations including US, in search of capital, and more open to innovation policies. E.g. USA, Japan
- EU-based startups having to develop new code bases if they wish to sell outside of the EU, which means more time, cost, and risk
- Foundation models such as GPT-4 have been termed ‘systemic’. Has this aggressive categorization come too early?
- Need for greater transparency. To publish publicly available summaries of training data which might affect competitiveness and IP
- How does one go about educating citizens of how algorithmic harms happen if citizens have been given more agency to complain about AI systems.

This roundtable reflects Elevandi’s commitment to advancing adoption of frontier technologies. This includes consideration of the Use of AI/ML in Financial Supervision by Central Banks in a 2024 FutureMatters opinion.

The RegTech Association research has found that the adoption of RegTech or SupTech for supervisors is on the rise with 80% of regulators in the last survey indicating that they had onboarded a solution in the prior 12 months and engagement levels are high. There are still challenges on the needs for regulators and central agencies not being clear on their needs and challenges in onboarding innovation.

Under the theme of Decoding Digital Assets and Payments, this roundtable will be a first step in creating a safe space conversation with supervisors and technology companies. It will feature presentations from BIS and Central Banks from Europe as well as technology companies in the SupTech/RegTech arena. The presentations will be followed by a moderated discussion that will crystallise the points from the speakers and unpack the opportunities, barriers and the new horizons with input from the attendees of the session.

Attendees who wish to familiarise themselves with the topic may refer to the reference materials below.
- Use of AI/ML in financial supervision by central banks
- Building a more diverse suptech ecosystem: findings from surveys of financial authorities and suptech vendors (bis.org)
- The RegTech Association - Industry Perspectives 2023 (regtechglobal.org)