On Monday of this week, the Bank of England governor Mark Carney promised to reinvent the Bank of England to make it fit for the “new economy” of the “Fourth Industrial Revolution", reflecting changes in how society, business and government operate.
The governor indicated that the bank was beginning to opening up its own payments infrastructure to start-ups from the FinTech sector, while also delivering increasing emphasis on concerns such as climate change. At the same time, the bank would also be looking to embrace artificial intelligence (AI) to assist the bank in facing changes in technology and the world economy.
To a casual follower of Carney’s deliberations the topics of FinTech, climate change and AI might be seen as separate matters, but in reality, they are highly interdependent.
Already, investment firms are being requested to include environmental sustainability in their decision criteria; with disclosure obligations set on how institutional investors and asset managers integrate ecological, social, and governance into their reporting.
It is also the case that with tightening environmental legislation, and governments steering tax policy to support more environmentally friendly solutions, firms that embrace these trends that will likely be the most successful and should thus be the targets for corporate investment.
The challenge at present, particularly in Europe, is that the banking sector is constrained heavily by rules and regulations following the 2008 financial crisis. As a result, banks typically need ten times the capital they required pre-2008 to support the same size book of business.
So at one level companies are racing to develop technologies such as AI to support the environmentally friendly vision of electrically powered autonomous vehicles - which will not just be greener to run, but also shareable, allowing smarter routing to help keep cars off the roads. But at the same time, the banking sector is struggling to provide all the necessary investment.
This is the reason Carney has identified the need to reform the model and allow the FinTech sector better access to both the central bank and to markets to help drive the next wave of innovation.
At Verne Global, we follow these trends closely. We invest in delivering support to organisations building the latest and most advanced AI solutions, while also providing an environmentally friendly approach to business with our 100% renewable energy driven machine learning and AI platforms. Get in touch via www.verneglobal.com
