On Thursday 24 October 2019, the Commission de Surveillance du Secteur Financier (CSSF) and the University of Luxembourg’s Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SnT) signed, in the presence of Finance Minister Pierre Gramegna, a partnership agreement in the field of artificial intelligence (AI).
The agreement is aimed at positioning Luxembourg as a European centre of excellence and innovation in the field of AI applied to state-of-the-art financial data processing techniques.
As the supervisory authority of the financial sector, the CSSF faces mounting challenges. Civil society demands effective regulation of the financial centre, including minimising financial risks, whereas professionals of the finance industry ask for improved responsiveness. Claude Marx, Managing Director of CSSF, explained: "Faced with these challenges, the CSSF has implemented its CSSF4.0 strategy. This will be a big step towards achieving close to real-time supervision".
As part of this strategy, the CSSF will increase investment in agent training, review work processes and make extensive use of new digital technologies, such as AI, machine learning and other tools commonly applied throughout the FinTech sector. It is as part of this CSSF4.0 strategy that the CSSF and SnT have begun their partnership.
Björn Ottersten, director of SnT, elaborated: “This research partnership provides us with a tremendous opportunity to leverage our expertise in Artificial Intelligence to help support our partner’s CSSF4.0 strategy. Working on concrete projects with companies ensures our research has an impact beyond the academic world, which is very rewarding”.
To date, the research centre has fourteen partnerships in FinTech and most of them use some form of AI technology. SnT is actively involved in Luxembourg’s economy, collaborating with over 40 public and private partners in joint research projects. According to the CSSF, the resulting concepts present a genuine, long-lasting competitive advantage for companies in Luxembourg and beyond.
Pierre Gramegna, Minister of Finance, commented: "I welcome the partnership agreement that the CSSF and the SnT signed today to conduct joint research. By engaging in research on how to leverage new technologies such as AI in order to make the analysis and processing of fund documentation or regulatory reporting faster and more efficient, the CSSF not only underscores its openness to technological innovation, but will also contribute to further strengthening the competitiveness of Luxembourg’s financial centre”.
The partnership begins today and will last for a minimum of three years, renewable by tacit agreement. Its first project is "Automated Compliance Checking and Query Answering for Fund Documents". This project will use artificial intelligence to extract data from documents submitted to the CSSF by fund managers and to verify regulatory compliance.
