Hans is Global Chief Industry Specialist Digital Finance at the International Finance Corporation (IFC), a member of the World Bank Group. IFC is the largest global development institution and aims to grow the private sector in developing countries by providing funding facilities, equity investments and advisory services. IFC’s investment commitments were $44 billion last year. Hans and his team engage with digital banks, digitizing financial institutions, embedded finance providers, and digital ecosystem platforms in developing countries, with the purpose of supporting these digital financial services providers in their financial inclusion ambitions. Hans is a Dutch executive with 25 years of experience in banking, global strategy, private equity, wealth management, and international project finance. He has a degree in Business Economics from the University of Groningen and attended Executive Programs at business schools INSEAD and IMD. He is based out of Washington, DC.
Hall C (Level 2)
Forming Frontier Tech
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.