Financial firms that use artificial intelligence (AI) should establish a top decision-making body to set risk management and ethical principles and clarify the accountability of executives and employees. They should also build an AI risk assessment system and set up an independent risk management organization.
The Financial Services Commission (FSC) said on the 22nd that it held a financial sector AI council at the Seoul YWCA building, chaired by Vice Chair Kwon Dae-young, and will implement the "integrated AI guidelines for the financial sector" in the first quarter of next year. The FSC released new integrated guidelines that combine the AI operations guidelines for the financial sector released in 2021 and the financial AI security guidelines made public in 2023.
The Financial Services Commission (FSC) presented seven principles in the integrated guidelines: ▲ governance ▲ legality ▲ subsidiarity ▲ reliability ▲ financial stability ▲ good faith and fidelity ▲ security. As for detailed implementation, financial firms using AI should establish a top decision-making body to set risk management and ethical principles and form an independent, dedicated risk management unit. They should clarify executive and employee accountability for AI use and differentiate and codify situations requiring staff intervention. They should regularly manage AI model performance and check for fairness and bias, among other factors.
Financial firms should conduct financial stability risk assessments for AI and put in place safeguards such as emergency shutdown devices and backup models. They should identify applicable laws in advance—such as the AI Basic Act, the Financial Consumer Protection Act, the Credit Information Act, and the Personal Information Protection Act—and reflect them in work procedures. They should prepare consumer protection measures, including preventing conflicts of interest such as infringement of financial consumer interests. They should also establish security measures for identifying and managing security threats, detecting and responding to specialized attacks, and protecting and managing AI asset s.
The Financial Services Commission (FSC) plans to apply the integrated guidelines as self-regulation by industry sector and to collect industry opinions to improve and supplement them.
The council also unveiled detailed directions to support the combination and use of financial data. The financial authorities plan to present specifics such as cautions and checklists for pseudonymization and anonymization to set standards for using a wider variety of data, including unstructured data like images, video, and audio, as well as synthetic data.
To streamline data combination procedures, the authorities plan to support shorter turnaround times through a data combination fast track for periodic and repetitive information combinations. When a specialized data agency has an environment that can safely manage combined information, it will be allowed to reuse the combined information without destroying it, thereby promoting the continued use of combined data and quantitative growth of data. These measures to support data combination and use are also scheduled to take effect in January next year.