ECB’s Lagarde: Capital Markets Could Benefit From Artificial Intelligence

18 January 2024

By Isabel Teles – FRANKFURT (Econostream) – European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde on Thursday said that artificial intelligence could play an important role in the progress of capital markets.

In a panel discussion during the Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Lagarde said that some elements that could contribute to a ‘Kantian shift’ in the Capital Markets Union were a single set of rules, a more consolidated trade infrastructure mechanism and artificial intelligence.

‘And when I say that artificial intelligence could help, I believe that is not a question of eliminating the marketplace that Frankfurt, Paris, Madrid, Milan and Dublin can constitute eventually, but to bring them under one single mechanism, one single set of rules, one single regulator’, she said.

The ‘Kantian shift’ towards the Capital Markets Union was a reference to a speech given in November, in which she argued that it was necessary to ‘move from this bottom-up approach that we have adopted for the last 15 years to a top-down approach.’

This process needed to be agile because ‘climate transition is an imperative and has to move fast’, she said.

‘I contend that there is actually a set of circumstances that could fully justify that we go over the many hurdles that we have faced and that still exist in order to put in place a Capital Market’, she said.