People in the Netherlands are wary of AI being used at financial institutions

People from the Netherlands are more critical of artificial intelligence (AI) being used by financial institutions than in a general sense, De Nederlandsche Bank (DNB) reported. The central bank researched what people think of AI in cooperation with the Authority for the Financial Markets (AFM).

The DNB and AFM spoke to over 2,200 people for the study. The results showed that 22 percent of the people asked were negative about financial organizations using AI. This is more than the number of people pessimistic about AI in general, which was 15 percent of those surveyed.

Participants said they believe the risks of financial organizations like banks using the technologies outweigh the positives. A slight majority have no opinion or are neutral on the subject.

Most people do not know how their bank, insurer, or pension fund uses artificial intelligence, DNB, and AFM reports. Only six percent of the people asked said they have a good idea of what their bank does with AI.

DNB and AFM also examined financial organizations. The study shows that banks, insurers, asset managers, and pension providers are increasingly using artificial intelligence.

Most organizations that are not using AI yet have concrete plans to start doing so in the future. AI applications, for example, automatically summarize telephone conversations with customers for financial organizations. Chatbots are also trained with recorded conversations; according to the researchers,

Financial organizations also use artificial intelligence to combat fraud, money laundering, and financing terrorism. This is meant to prevent discrimination, privacy violations, and bad business practices, DNB and AFM think.