Bank of England’s Oliver Thew and Mohammed Gharbawi, Senior Fintech Specialists at the Bank of England’s Fintech Hub, join us on FRT to discuss their recent Bank article on the impact of COVID-19 on the use of machine learning and data science in UK banking, and more widely key challenges around the use of AI and ML in finance.

The Bank of England’s Fintech Hub helps the Bank understand what fintech means for the stability of the UK financial system, the safety and soundness of financial firms, and the Bank’s ability to perform its operational and regulatory roles. Mohammed highlights the work on AI/ML that the Bank has been doing in the last few years, and together with Ollie he discusses the recent trends in UK banking that were present prior to the current COVID-19 pandemic.

Mohammed also reflects on the two main impacts of COVID-19 that were identified in their paper - the positive impact of ML in UK banking during COVID-19, and certain risks that are amplified with ML. Financial institutions initially saw a decrease in the model performance of ML models, and we discuss lessons learned by these financial institutions that came through in their results.

Finally, Ollie walks us through the Bank and FCA’s AI Public Private Forum and the recent findings in their discussions.