Thu 11 Apr 2024 - Within modern society, artificial intelligence has long been a part of human innovation. Its increased prevalence in recent years has rocked society and captivated global interest.
In fact, many are now suggesting the growth of AI is heading towards an inflection point capable of producing a technological renaissance akin to the rise of the internet or the splitting of the atom.
But what does the rise of AI mean for the actuarial and wider financial services sector? In our new thought leadership webinar series, the IFoA will seek to address this question.
We will draw on expertise from the worlds of policy, science, academia, and financial services to demystify AI and its growing role in society. The series will seek to tackle the big debates around AI ethics and regulation and set out the work we as an organisation are undertaking in this space.
The second event of the series takes a deep dive into AI ethics and regulation and how this can impact the work of actuaries. We are joined by representatives from the Turing Institute, the Ada Lovelace Foundation, and the London Institute for Banking and Finance.
Chair
IFoA President-elect Kartina Tahir Thomson is a Senior Director at WTW and brings 25 years of diverse actuarial, risk, governance and regulatory experience. She is also a Director on the board of a publicly listed firm.
Kartina has a varied career that includes spending six years at the Bank of England, where she supervised a portfolio of insurance firms responsible for ensuring financial stability of the UK financial market.
Prior to that, Kartina held the Chief Risk Officer role at an insurance company and also led the Risk and Analytics proposition for a global insurance broker. She performed her actuarial training in a couple of large global insurance companies.
Kartina is a long-time volunteer who has served on the IFoA Council for six years and is a member of the IFoA Audit and Risk Committee. She has also been on the Board of Directors of the Actuarial Association of Europe for four years and has been recently confirmed as the next President-elect 2023/24.
Co-Director and Co-Founder of the Public Policy Programme at The Alan Turing Institute
Dr Cosmina Dorobantu is the Co-Director and Co-Founder of the Public Policy Programme at The Alan Turing Institute, the UK’s national institute for data science and artificial intelligence. With a team of more than 55 full-time academics, the programme is one of the largest research programmes in the world working on data science and AI for the public sector.
Cosmina works alongside government departments and regulators to understand not only how they can benefit from the latest generation of data-intensive technologies, but also how these technologies should be regulated. She is a member of the UK government’s trade and economy panel, within the Department for Business and Trade, and the Mayor of London’s Data for London Board. In the past, she was a member of the Financial Conduct Authority and the Bank of England’s Financial Services Artificial Intelligence Public-Private Forum.
Prior to joining The Alan Turing Institute, Dr Dorobantu was an Executive Director and Co-Founder of Aurora Energy Research, which is now the largest power analytics provider in Europe. It has over 500 employees and offices in 10 countries. She also spent 5 years at Google, defining the country’s investment and business strategy in Eastern Europe, Middle East, and Africa. She has an MPhil (obtained with Distinction) and a DPhil in Economics from the University of Oxford.
Matthew Edwards is an experienced life actuary working as the innovation lead in WTW’s UKI life division. He has been at the forefront of introducing predictive analytics into life and pensions work, with particular regard to mortality modelling. More recently, he co-wrote WTW’s response to the Bank of England’s consultation on the use of AI in financial services. He has also been working on a range of insurance applications of GenerativeAI.
He is leading a small working group on the actuarial profession’s approach to GenerativeAI. He is a former Chair of the CMI, co-chair/co-founder of the COVID-19 Actuaries Response Group, and was elected to Council in 2023.
Head of AI Governance and Regulatory Innovation, and Policy Fellow at The Alan Turing Institute
Dr Florian Ostmann is Head of AI Governance and Regulatory Innovation at The Alan Turing Institute. Working within the institute’s public policy programme, he leads a portfolio of work covering regulation and non-regulatory governance mechanisms for AI as well as the use of AI to facilitate the work of regulatory bodies. Florian’s responsibilities include leading the Turing’s work on the AI Standards Hub: an initiative dedicated to knowledge sharing, community building, strategic research, and international collaboration around standardisation for AI technologies.
In terms of sector-specific expertise, the financial services domain has been a particular focus of Florian’s work, with projects examining questions of responsible AI innovation in financial services and the use of data and machine learning to address modern slavery risks in the investment context. In previous roles, Florian worked at the Shorenstein Center on media, politics and public policy, as a consultant on autonomous vehicle policy, social impact measurement, and responsible investing, and for the Pan American Health Organization. He holds a Master in Public Policy from the Harvard Kennedy School and a PhD from University College London.
Associate Director, Centre for Digital Banking and Finance at the London Institute of Banking and Finance
Originally a Commercial Banker, Helene is a Director with the LIBF Centre for Digital Banking and Finance, and current lead for the LIBF Centre for the Study of Financial Innovation. She is an experienced FinTech Programme Director, entrepreneur, educator and author. Her career boasts a number of ‘firsts’, including the FinTech Scale Programme for Rainmaking, the Inaugural Programme of Education and Events for Innovate Finance, the FinTech Entrepreneurship Masters’ for UCL. Board and advisory roles the UK safeguarding RegTech, Kalgera, the development house, Skillwork, and the UK Digital Bank Pennyworth. She is also a Trustee for the International Longevity Centre, and a Board member of the ICAEW Financial Services Faculty. On the CW 100 Women in Tech Award list, the Innovate Finance Women in FinTech Power List, & the Fintech Magazine 100 Women in Fintech list, she also took part in FCA 2020 Data Sprint on SME Lending, the Executive Steering Committee of the CapGemini Global FinTech Report, the Advisory Board member for MoneyLive. Her book ‘Reinventing Banking & Finance: Frameworks to navigate global fintech innovation’ (Kogan), was the #1 banking book for 2021/22 by Investopedia.
Associate Director (Emerging technology and industry practice) at the Ada Lovelace Institute
Andrew is an Associate Director at the Ada Lovelace Institute and is responsible for Ada’s work addressing emerging technology and industry practice.
Andrew has spent the last decade working at the intersection of technology, law, and society. Prior to joining Ada, he was an Ethics and Policy Researcher at DeepMind. There he managed internal AI ethics initiatives and oversaw the company’s network of external partnerships. Previously, he worked as a Legal Operations Specialist at Google where he developed and implemented platform moderation policies on areas such as data protection, hate speech, terrorist content, and child safety.
You can watch the recording of this webinar on the IFoA’s Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). Watch recording.
11 March: Watch the recording - Artificial intelligence thought leadership series: keynote session
9 May: Artificial intelligence thought leadership series: global impact and challenges