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Adopting AI Responsibly in Public Finance

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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

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Standard Chartered Joins Temenos Partner Programme

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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.

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Financial

Global Payments to Acquire Worldpay for $22.7bn

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  • 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.”

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Financial

Huawei Moves Into Financial Services Industry

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Huawei announced the launch of the Financial Partner Go Global Program (FPGGP) Acceleration Program during the 2024 HiFS Frontier Forum. Huawei aims to work with more partners that have extensive industry-specific experience, focus on key scenarios within digital transformation in the global financial industry, and unite program participants and their capacity to innovate.

In this way, Huawei and partners can support the transformation and upgrade of customers in the financial industry throughout the lifecycle from consultation, solutions, to services, achieving win-win cooperation for all involved.

Jason Cao, Vice President of Huawei and CEO of Huawei Digital Finance BU, stated that Huawei is committed to building a global ecosystem for the digital finance industry. This involves global leading partners, those who are engaged in the local industry, and who are innovators in segmented scenarios. “Huawei has worked with partners to develop innovative scenario-based solutions in eight mainstream industry scenarios, from infrastructure O&M to application system platforms, from core business transactions to big data applications, and from banking to insurance and securities.”

FPGGP made its debut in 2021. Over the past three years, FPGGP has worked with 11 partners to successfully deliver solutions and complete digital transformation for over 20 financial customers in 14 countries and regions worldwide. Now, it had 24 partners join in China, among which six became council members: Sunline, Tongdun Technology, Netis, Wallyt, Sinosoft, and Chinasoft International.

Roger Wang, Vice President of Huawei Digital Finance BU and President of Global Partnerships, said that Huawei stick to the “Partners + Huawei” strategy and keep cooperating with world-leading financial partners for shared success, and provide excellent solutions, innovation capabilities, and outstanding practices with partners. As of May 2024, Huawei has served over 3600 financial customers in more than 60 countries and regions, including 53 of the world’s top 100 banks.

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