Laura van Geest, chair of the Dutch Authority for the Financial Markets, held the keynote marking the Wednesday morning launch in London of the yearly operations conference Optic, by the Association for Financial Markets in Europe. A large part of her short presentation focused on approaches to artificial intelligence, and the opportunities for market actors and regulators to find positive paths forward.
Laura van Geest emphasised the good reasons for regulators and markets, across both the EU and UK, to form a unified front to promote financial market growth, under good supervision.
She describes her own national supervisory body as one of few across the EU that advocates replacing national supervision by a united body.
On artificial intelligence, she pointed to how proprietary trading firms all use self-learning (machine learning-based) algorithms to place orders. That makes it difficult for the market participants to answer properly when the regulator asks them why they have acted a certain way; it gets increasingly “black-boxed”, and algorithms can even form collusions. Still, her overall picture of AI remains positive, assuming it is well handled by market actors and regulators together. Indeed, she described some new AI-based tools at the hands of regulators as their “new gold”, including an ability to see “heat maps” of market activity, and being able to set hot spots in connection with events having occurred just before.
The yearly Optic conference, in London on 2–3 October 2024, is hosted by the Association for Financial Markets in Europe (AFME). Optic stands for the “Operations, post trade, technology and innovation conference”. PostTrade 360° is there, with our coverage collected here.
