Big Tech's unregulated roll‐out out of experimental AI poses risks to the achievement of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), with particular vulnerability for developing countries. The goal of financial inclusion is threatened by the imperfect and ungoverned design and implementation of AI decision‐making software making important financial decisions affecting customers. Automated decision‐making algorithms have displayed evidence of bias, lack ethical governance, and limit transparency in the basis for their decisions, causing unfair outcomes and amplify unequal access to finance. Poverty reduction and sustainable development targets are risked by Big Tech's potential exploitation of developing countries by using AI to harvest data and profits. Stakeholder progress toward preventing financial crime and corruption is further threatened by potential misuse of AI. In the light of such risks, Big Tech's unscrupulous history means it cannot be trusted to operate without regulatory oversight. The article proposes effective pre‐emptive regulatory options to minimize scenarios of AI damaging the SDGs. It explores internationally accepted principles of AI governance, and argues for their implementation as regulatory requirements governing AI developers and coders, with compliance verified through algorithmic auditing. Furthermore, it argues that AI governance frameworks must require a benefit to the SDGs. The article argues that proactively predicting such problems can enable continued AI innovation through well‐designed regulations adhering to international principles. It highlights risks of unregulated AI causing harm to human interests, where a public and regulatory backlash may result in over‐regulation that could damage the otherwise beneficial development of AI.
Despite an emerging international consensus on principles of AI governance, lawmakers have so far failed to translate those principles into regulations in the financial sector. Perhaps, in order to remain competitive in the global race for AI supremacy without being typecast as stifling innovation, typically cautious financial regulators are unusually allowing the introduction of experimental AI technology into the financial sector, with few controls on the unprecedented risks to consumers and financial stability. Once an unregulated AI software causes serious economic harm, a public and regulatory backlash would lead to over-regulation that could harm innovation of this potentially beneficial technology. Artificial intelligence is rapidly influencing the financial sector with innumerable potential benefits, such as enhancing financial services and improving regulatory compliance. This article argues that the best way to encourage a sustainable future in AI innovation in the financial sector is to support a proactive regulatory approach prior to any financial harm occurring. This proactive approach should implement rational regulations that embody jurisdiction-specific rules in line with carefully construed international principles.
Trade finance helps businesses deal with abnormal cash flows whilst managing counterparty risk and enhancing confidence in commercial transactions. It also allows parties to overcome trust barriers that may inhibit commercial activity in both a domestic and international commercial context. Globally, particularly among micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs), there exists a significant and widening unmet demand for documentary finance. Securing trade finance is laborious and time-consuming. For MSMEs, the trade finance application process alone, can be an insurmountable barrier that usually ends in rejection. By its nature, trade finance arrangements engage with decentralized stakeholders and diffused information sources across supply chains. Issuers and underwriters of trade finance instruments are required to draw on disparate elements of information, not merely during the application phase, but indeed throughout the life of a transaction. Blockchain technology is similarly decentralized and can capture information in a secure, transparent and immutable manner potentially improving and reinvigorating the trade finance space. As Qatar embarks on a strategy of widening its economic base away from a singular reliance on the hydrocarbon fuel sector, the introduction of blockchain technology holds the potential to overcome the transactional friction associated with trade finance. A more efficient and accessible trade finance sector will ultimately enhance the competitiveness of MSMEs whilst simultaneously fostering the growing FinTech sector in Qatar.
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