Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly evolving from automating routine tasks to becoming a predictive—and even prescriptive—tool in public finance. At Thursday’s New Economy Forum Workshop, two panels explored how AI and GovTech are being used across governments, and how to scale responsibly while pushing innovation forward.  

“It’s not about getting one big thing right… [it’s about] getting 32 million things right,” said Edward Kieswetter, Commissioner of the South African Revenue Service. Since introducing AI tools like chatbots, biometric facial recognition for e-filing registration, and web-based assistance, South Africa has added $18 billion to its fiscal year revenue. Kieswetter pointed to three key gains: streamlining services for taxpayers, stronger compliance and fraud prevention, and most notably, increased public trust. 

Across OECD countries, “there is no single or even preferred model [of adoption]”, said Delphine Moretti, Working Party Lead on Public Financial Management and Reporting for the OECD. Governments are using AI to forecast economic trends and help inform spending decisions. France and Indonesia, for instance, use AI to monitor fiscal risk at the subnational level through accounting data. Still, oversight bodies, public financial management frameworks, and communities of practice are critical to help manage risk and ensure that innovation leads to real gains. 

In Brazil, AI is also being leveraged for fiscal education. Tania Gomes, Coordinator for Data, Products and Digital Transformation, Treasury of Brazil, showcased “Talk to SICONFI”, a generative AI agent that answers queries on public fiscal data across federal, state, and local levels. Promoting training and digital literacy for AI is just as essential, she added. 

AI tools can be scaled broadly at extremely low costs, but doing so requires strong risk management frameworks and agile governance, says David Hadwick, a researcher at the Centre of Excellence ‘Digitax’. Spanish Tax Agency’s Chief Information Officer, José Borja Tomé, illustrated this with the agency’s “test-and-pause” approach, underscoring that “assigning responsibility is key”. 

Panelists agreed that policies guiding AI use in public finance should prioritize transparency, fairness, efficiency, and use trusted, high-quality data. Increasingly so, “the metrics of AI ethics correspond to the metrics of performance for these administrations,” Hadwick added.

Culled from IMF.org

Standard Chartered has embedded its FX API service on the Temenos Exchange ecosystem, becoming the first bank to join the core banking vendor’s partner programme.

Through the integration, financial institutions (FIs) on the Temenos platform will benefit from a faster go-to-market in accessing the Standard Chartered’s extensive currencies offering, allowing them to price services across more than 130 currencies and 5,000 currency pairs while managing exposure risks to FX market volatility.

The integration releases the strain on inhouse technology resources, which is considered beneficial for retail banks, wealth managers and payment providers handling low-value or high-volume transactions that sit outside their treasury function.

• The payments sector is getting a major shakeup, with Global Payments agreeing a $22.7 billion deal to acquire Worldpay from GTRC and FIS while offloading its Issuer Solutions business to FIS for $13.5 billion.

Global Payments says Worldpay provides highly complementary payments, software and commerce enablement technology to merchants and partners worldwide. On a combined basis, the company will serve more than six million customers and enable approximately 94 billion transactions and $3.7 trillion in volume across more than 175 countries.

Cameron Bready, CEO, Global Payments, says: “The acquisition of Worldpay and divestiture of Issuer Solutions further sharpen our strategic focus and simplify Global Payments as a pure play merchant solutions business with significantly expanded capabilities, extensive scale, greater market access and an enhanced financial profile.”