On 22 June 2023, the European Commission, published the keynote speech delivered by Commissioner McGuiness, at the FinTech Soiree hosted by the European Fintech association.

In her speech, Commissioner McGuiness highlights the following points:

• The Commission is aware that artificial intelligence (AI) is already being used to detect fraud, assess creditworthiness, evaluate risk more generally and provide financial advice when people are making investment decisions or executing trades.
• But issues can arise with AI as it is built on data and if the data is not good or if it is biased it influences what the AI delivers. There are also risks of unintended bias or discrimination and security threats. There are also logistical and management issues around using AI and whether AI systems are robust or resilient enough.
• Therefore, accountability and governance really matters particularly as it can be hard to explain how an AI system came to a particular outcome.
• The Commission is being guided by its Digital Finance Strategy and Retail Payments Strategy and has made good progress in implementing both. For example, the Digital Operational Resilience Act is already in the implementation phase and the Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation has recently been published in the Official Journal of the EU.
• The Commission has also been looking at instant payments, having adopted a proposal last October. The Council reached its negotiating position in May, and the European Parliament is due to vote early next month. With this quick progress the legislation may be adopted later this year. Commissioner McGuiness argues that there is a need to stay ambitious, any exclusions from the scope of the proposals which would undermine the aim of instant payments being universally available should be avoided as should extending the deadlines too much.
• Building on Open Banking, the Commission will propose next week rules on Open Finance – the Financial Data Access framework.