What it Means for Us: the Uses, Opportunities, and Risks of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the Financial Services Sector

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Earlier this week, Prosperity Now submitted comments to the Department of the Treasury's Request for Information on the Uses, Opportunities, and Risks of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the Financial Services Sector. Prosperity Now is dedicated to transforming current systems, practices, and policies in service of an economy that works for everyone. We believe the Treasury Department and other federal regulators have an important role to play in advancing the cause of equity in their oversight of AI technologies in the financial sector. In our comments, we recommended a package of supervisory, legal, and legislative actions that the federal government should take to foster the equitable and trustworthy development and use of AI including:

• setting robust standards for governance of AI technologies, including the use of data that is used to develop and implement, that is representative of all sectors of the United States population and not just those who already have full access to fair and sustainable financial services;
• developing more specific guidance for financial institutions to follow including the scope, cadence and metrics of fair lending oversight, when they are using AI technologies;
• recognizing that discrimination is unfair as a governing principle that applies not only credit products, but also deposit accounts and other non-credit products and services; and
• supporting passage of the Fair Lending For All Act to make sure that all companies, and not just creditors, who provide financial services and develop AI in support, of those services are covered by the Equal Credit Opportunity Act.

All of these actions would go a long way to fostering financial inclusion and ensuring that the proliferation of AI helps build a bridge toward economic equity rather than further widen the existing gap to an unbridgeable chasm.