The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and the Bank of England (BoE) conducted a joint survey in 2019 to better understand the current use of machine learning (ML) in UK financial services, including the current state of deployment, maturity of applications, use cases, benefits and risks.
The survey was sent to almost 300 firms, including banks, credit brokers, e-money institutions, financial market infrastructure firms, investment managers, insurers, non-bank lenders and principal trading firms, with a total of 106 responses received.
The results, together with ongoing dialogue with the industry and other authorities, both domestically and internationally, will help identify where there are policy questions that need to be answered in the future, in order to support the safe and productive deployment of ML within the financial sector.
This joint BoE-FCA report is the result of the analysis of the responses to the survey and presents:
- a quantitative overview of the use of ML across the respondent firms
- the ML implementation strategies of firms that responded to the survey
- approaches to the governance of ML
- the share of applications developed by third-party providers
- respondents’ views on the benefits of ML
- perceptions of risks and ethical considerations
- perspectives on constraints to development and deployment of ML
- a snapshot of the use of different methods, data, safeguards performance metrics, validation techniques and perceived levels of complexity