The banking sector supports the regulation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) carried out by the European Union in recent months and focuses on how it will be implemented starting next year. This was highlighted by the main players in the financial sector at the conference on Banking Regulation and AI organized by elEconomista.es with the support of nCino.
The panel discussion, preceded by the intervention of Maria Abascal from AEB, featured Joaquín Sevilla, Chief Digital Officer from Unicaja; Jesús Lozano, Senior Manager of the Digital Regulation team at BBVA; Guerino Di Domenico, Regional Vice President EMEA at nCino; José Manuel de la Chica, CTO of Santander Universities & Universia; Nicolás Coello, Chief Data Officer of Banca March; and Luis Echavarri, responsible for AI and Advance Analytics Planning at Sabadell. They unanimously emphasized the relevance of this regulation.
“It is reasonable and should not have a significant impact on companies like us to comply,” said the BBVA representative, pointing out the risk of certain products not reaching Europe. “When analyzing the regulation, I think there are different aspects: if you are a company that develops AI, in most cases, you do not need to meet any extra requirements unless they are high-risk. If they are, they refer to sectors that are already highly regulated, such as finance or health,” he pointed out.
“We do not consider the regulator as a hindrance, it helps us make the change responsibly and not take too big a step,” acknowledged nCino. “Establishing use cases for us as a bank is beneficial, also for the customer. We are all scared, as users, of the capabilities of AI. If other regions do not do it, it will be imposed by society,” acknowledged the Unicaja representative. This same idea was supported by Banco Santander, “it is very good and establishes guardrails globally, providing a framework and focus on key areas to work on, such as interpretability or observability.”
In fact, entities such as Banca March see clear opportunities in this new regulation. “It can benefit us because we will be major consumers and not generators of models, except in very specific use cases. If legislation has passed, it will be much easier to implement.” But there are also doubts, as the Sabadell representative pointed out, “the problem is how it will be implemented. Our experience with validating models has not been very efficient.”
