The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) is to take up a number of recommendations from the Mills Review including becoming more of an agentic regulator and scaling up innovation services, all while resisting setting specific rules related to artificial intelligence (AI).
This is according to FCA chief data, information and intelligence officer Jessica Rusu, who was speaking at its annual public meeting press conference yesterday afternoon where she also revealed that the regulator will publish good and bad practices related to AI over the next couple of days.
The Mills Review, published in July and led by former FCA executive director Sheldon Mills, contained seven recommendations including for the regulator to build and adopt an AI-enabled agentic supervisory model, and to scale up the FCA’s AI Lab to support AI models and system innovation in financial services.
But Mills also maintained that the current regulatory framework governing AI in financial services does not need to be replaced.
Becoming an agentic regulator
Rusu told journalists that the FCA is taking forward some of the recommendations including for the regulator to become agentic.
“We are taking forward recommendations, for example, becoming an agentic regulator,” Rusu said. “That’s part of our strategy to think about how we can better use technology.”
Scaling innovation services
But Rusu added that the the way in which firms are operating, adopting AI and the opportunity that they have to work with FCA innovation sandboxes had also been discussed.
“We spoke about how we’re scaling that innovation services, so innovation services and scaling them was one of the recommendations as well,” Rusu continued.
“So we’re looking at every which way that we can to partner with industry in adopting AI safely while recognising that the risks of AI continue to evolve quite rapidly as the technology evolves quite rapidly.”
Good and bad practice
Rusu further revealed that the FCA will publish good and practice related to AI over the next couple of days.
“This sets out what we’ve learned thus far about how firms have adopted AI well and things that they should watch out for as they are embedding the technology,” she continued.
“We aren’t planning to make new rules specific to AI, but rather to lean into the rules that we already have and we spoke today about the strength of the Consumer Duty and what it allows us to do.”
