Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) Partners with Financial Industry to Create Framework for Responsible Use of AI and Data Analytics (AIDA)

Updated On : August 2020

The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) was established in the year 1971. The MAS is the central bank and integrated financial regulatory authority of Singapore. To develop Singapore as a dynamic international financial centre MAS is working with the financial industry.

On November 2019, Monetary Authority of Singapore(MAS) announced that it will be working with the financial industry for creating a framework for financial institutions to promote adoption of artificial intelligence and data analytics (AIDA).

The name of the framework is Veritas, it was highlighted by Mr Heng Swee Keat, Deputy Prime Minister of Singapore, during his speech "Singapore's National AI Strategy" at the Singapore Fintech Festival and Singapore Week of Innovation and Technology (SFF x SWITCH) 2019.

The Veritas association currently have 25 members from MAS, SGInnovate, EY and members from financial institutions.

This framework will enable financial institutions to evaluate their ADIA driven solutions. It aims to help financial institutions in providing a verifiable way to incorporate the principles of fairness, ethics, accountability and transparency (FEAT) into their AIDA solutions.

The FEAT principles and Veritas are one of the National AI Strategy, that will help to build a progressive and trusted ecosystem for AI adoption in the finance industry.

It comprises of open source tools that can be applied to various business lines like retail banking, corporate finance, and more. Initially, Veritas will focus on customer marketing, risk scoring and fraud detection related uses cases.

On 28 May 2020, MAS announced the first phase of Veritas initiative will start with the development of fairness metrics in credit scoring and customer marketing. This will help financial institutions to validate the fairness of their AIDA solutions.

Following are the two uses cases for validating the fairness of AIDA solutions

• Credit Risk Scoring : It will help financial institutions to assess the creditworthiness of the borrowers. There is a large amount of data to analyse, the financial institutions are implementing the AI tools for this critical function.
• Customer Marketing : To analyse the customer data and match the product or services to customers, it is important to adopt AI tools, that will help the institutions by recommending right product to the right customer at the right time.

Two core team members from Veritas association, UOB and Element AI will be developing credit scoring metrics and HSBC, IAG Firemark Labs and Gradient Institute will be developing customer marketing metrics.

The association is going to publish a white paper and release open-source code, that will help financial institutions to adopt fairness metrics. The open-source code can be integrated into the IT ecosystem of financial institutions to validate the fairness of their AI solutions. The code will be deployed with the help of APIX platform. APIX platform is an open architecture platform that supports financial innovation and inclusion around the world. This will help financial institutions and Fintechs to have access to the technology and service providers on the platform.

Mr Sopnendu Mohanty, the CFO of MAS, said, "The responsible use of AI is a prerequisite for the greater adoption of AI in the financial sector. Veritas is the first industry-wide collaboration to provide a mathematical way to validate AIDA solutions against the principles of Fairness, Ethics, Accountability and Transparency. We hope Veritas will speed up the adoption of AI in financial services in the right direction."

According to a recent survey conducted by Microsoft and IDC, 52% of regional financial institutions surveyed have adopted the technology. The institutions that are using AI have seen improvements of between 17% and 25% in areas like improved business intelligence, customer engagement, innovation, and higher margins.

Artificial Intelligence is a gamechanger for the financial sector. AI can help in front, middle and back -office functions of banks and financial institutions. AI will help banks and financial institutions in the following ways

• Conversational banking
• Anti-fraud and risk
• Credit underwriting
• AI biometrics technology