News

Financial Technology and AI Addressed at Public Meeting

Published: October 6, 2021

Trust, automatization, responsibility, accountability, fraud, biases, and more was discussed at the WASP-HS Community Reference Meeting FinTech on October 5th.

WASP-HS Community Reference Meetings are dedicated for public and private organizations in Sweden to learn about challenges and questions of their interest, and for WASP-HS to share recent research development within the program in order to identify opportunities for collaboration in different sectors.

The meeting was initiated with a brief introduction by WASP-HS Program Director Virginia Dignum, who then gave the word over to keynote speaker Nicola Moch, Chief Information Officer at SEB Bank. Moch gave a talk on AI trends in the financial industry where he shared personal experiences from SEB’s journey and the FinTech landscape in general.

After Moch’s talk chairs and participants were divided into three roundtables. The discussions at the roundtables concerned accountability in, and of, FinTech, positives, and negatives of FinTech, as well as whether AI brings change to the FinTech sector.

Good and Bad

Kinga Barrafrem, Postoc at Linköping University, was chair of one of the roundtables. At the roundtable, it was discussed what positive and negative aspects there are of FinTech and AI. Barrafrem stated the following about the roundtable.

– We cannot design successful FinTech solutions without their users in mind. This roundtable will bring up the challenges that businesses may face when creating new FinTech solutions. In addition, we will discuss the societal expectations about the ethical and moral principles that should guide the actions of automated FinTech solutions.

Accountability

Magnus Strand, Associate Professor at Uppsala University, chair of another roundtable at which accountability was discussed, stated the following.

– FinTech is a future that is already here – at the same time a little unknown and already well known. In Sweden today, we can hardly imagine life without the convenient solutions provided by FinTech, such as fast transactions with a few taps on a mobile phone? At the same time, questions have arisen about such things as responsibility for consumer debt. CRM FinTech will be a welcome forum to discuss this.

Issues of FinTech and AI

All three roundtables were chaired by WASP-HS Principal Investigators. The topic and chairs were as following.

Accountability in (and of) FinTech Chairs – Magnus Strand, Uppsala University, and Mattias Levin, Deputy Head of the Digital Finance unit at the European Commission’s Directorate-General of Financial Stability, Financial Services and Capital Markets Union (DG FISMA)

The Good and the Bad of FinTech: When and for Whom Is It Helpful and When and for Whom Is It Detrimental?‘ Chairs – Kinga Barrafrem, and Gustav Tinghög both at Linköping University

Does AI Bring Radical Change to the FinTech Sector? Chairs Magnus Mähring, and Sebastian Krakowski, both at Stockholm School of Economics