UK regulators gather to form AI action plan.

April, UK - UK regulators came together last month to identify new AI applications designed to leverage their ‘world leading’ data. Data and digital experts from the Financial Conduct Authority, HM Revenue & Customs, the Department for Business and Trade, the UK Endorsement Board, Companies House, the Insolvency Service, and the Charity Commission gathered alongside AI and data experts at an event hosted by the Financial Reporting Council (FRC) in partnership with Aiimi to discuss ways to optimise the value of their structured data estates using AI.

The UK is world-leading in open and structured data and the UK has a strong commitment to publishing its Company and Organisational data to the public. This provides an unparalleled resource that can support the UK economic growth agenda. To best manage and make use of this data, the event aimed to pinpoint new AI use cases that could be implemented across various regulators, and ways to tackle barriers to AI adoption within and between these bodies.

Discussions at the event focused on use cases that would drive cost savings, efficiency, and economic growth – benefiting regulators, stakeholders, and the wider public. This aligns with the Government’s unveiling of a broader action plan last month, aimed at driving efficiencies across UK regulators.

Paul Maker, CTO at Aiimi, one of the AI experts in attendance, spoke about how UK regulators are uniquely positioned to effectively leverage the technology:

“UK regulators deal with unprecedented amounts of digital information and uphold unique levels of transparency. The potential value of this data for stakeholders and the overall economy is huge. For regulators managing sprawling documents and siloed data of all types, there are challenges as well as opportunities, many of which we’ve covered today. The main takeaway? Rich and well-governed data is AI rocket fuel. And regulators that leverage the technology to get their data estates in order have all the right ingredients.”

The event was attended by 30 senior managers, technology leaders, and data specialists, representing 9 UK regulators in total. The majority of attendees represented financial regulators.

Challenges discussed included defining the value of AI to get buy-in, and inadequate data quality. Respective solutions discussed included evidencing the impact of potential use cases through synthetic data first; and using AI to find and fix gaps in existing data, flag duplicate and conflicting documents, and join up information across disparate sources.

Tim Lloydlangston, XBRL Lead at HMRC, discussed how the latter could become a high-value AI use case for the financial regulator:

“HMRC is particularly data rich as we have a lot of data sources. This includes merchant-acquired data and data from banks as well as tax returns - within Corporation Tax we've got three million customers. So matching those datasets is a massive challenge. AI could help automate that process.”

Highlighting a successful AI use case in action, Thomas Toomse-Smith, Head of Innovation and Digital at the FRC, talked about how the financial watchdog’s new data viewer platform provides public access to its reporting data. Toomse-Smith explained how the tool is unlocking the value of millions of existing data points – in the form of Companies House and listed company Annual Reports and Accounts, for example – for investors, businesses and the public. This public tool sits alongside a regulatory toolkit which has been delivered as part of a Regulators Pioneer fund project (supported by DSIT and partially delivered by Aiimi). The toolkit and viewer form a cornerstone of future AI opportunity for structured data.

Josephine Jackson, Director of International Audit Policy at the FRC and Chair of the FRC’s Technology Working Group, highlighted the opportunities AI presents for UK regulators. During the event she commented: “Harnessing structured data through AI holds the opportunity to enhance decision making processes, but also enhance transparency and compliance by enabling greater precision and tracking analysis and reporting of information. This directly speaks to our internal strategies at the FRC.”

Phil Fitz-Gerald, Director of Digital Reporting & Taxonomies at FRC, focused on additional AI opportunities for the financial regulator to explore, commenting that: “Today has really made me think about the data we hold as an organisation, and how we can structure that in a way that maximises the use of AI… If we make data available for the public in a way that they can easily access, use, and analyse, we can support investment in business throughout the UK.”

As the lead on a project pioneering the use of a Gen AI-powered audit tool in the Netherlands, Marc van Gestel - Senior Supervision Officer, Audit & Reporting Quality Oversight, Dutch Authority for the Financial Markets (AFM)- reflected on the importance of international collaboration: “From algorithmic trading and consumer credit acceptance, to AI use in auditing and sustainability reporting… AI and automation continue to reshape capital markets, and regulators must stay ahead of the curve. The most important thing for us is international collaboration. We hope to partner with the UK and other regulators to share insights [and] strengthen global oversight efforts… It was really insightful today to speak to new colleagues and see what they're doing with data and AI. We'll stay in touch and exchange ideas and concepts that hopefully we can roll out in the UK and in the Netherlands.”

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