Archive: November 2023

On 14 November 2023, the European Payments Council published:

Crypto service providers (cryptodienstverleners) currently registered with the Dutch Central Bank (De Nederlandsche Bank, DNB) will soon have increased clarity regarding the customer due diligence required for their banking transactions. This clarity is being provided through the new sector standard established by the Dutch Banking Association (Nederlandse Vereniging van Banken, NVB) for risk-based customer due diligence in crypto service providers. The sector standard was developed following a series of roundtable discussions involving the Association of Bitcoin Companies Netherlands (VBNL), several of NVB’s members and DNB. With this sector standard in place, banks can conduct their customer due diligence in a risk-based manner, providing both banks and crypto service providers with a clear understanding of expectations and the types of inquiries to anticipate.

On 14 November 2023, the European Central Bank published a speech by Andrea Enria (Chair of ECB Supervisory Board) entitled ‘Regulating crypto finance: taking stock and looking ahead’.

On 14 November 2023, the FCA published a set of diagrams intended to act as an aid to understand the proposals set out in its Consultation Paper CP23/21 on consumer credit – product sales data reporting. For more detail on CP23/21, please see our previous blog.

On 26 October, the UK prime minister gave a speech on the AI Safety Summit to be hosted in the UK on 1 and 2 November. The summit will bring together representatives from large lab AI companies, world governments and civil society to discuss safety risks arising from frontier AI. Frontier AI is “highly capable general purpose AI models that can perform a wide variety of tasks that match or exceed the capabilities present in today’s most advanced models” (cutting edge foundation models) and the safety risks are cast quite widely, ranging from artificial general intelligence threatening our existence to the risk of deep fakes degrading trust in digital information sources.

On October 5, the Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry (ISED) wrote a letter to the Standing Committee on Industry and Technology proposing amendments to Artificial Intelligence and Data Act (AIDA), which was introduced as part of Bill C-27 in June 2022. Further information on AIDA can be found in our previous update.

On September 27, the Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry released a voluntary code of conduct specific to generative AI. This GenAI code follows the proposed Artificial Intelligence and Data Act (AIDA), which was introduced as part of Bill C-27 in June 2022 but will not likely be in force until 2025.

Professor Peter McBurney specialises in artificial intelligence (AI) and provides AI consultancy services to Norton Rose Fulbright LLP and our clients. In this article, corporate technology lawyer Sarah Esprit discusses generative AI with Professor McBurney.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to fundamentally change business processes, and also have a significant impact on human well-being. However, its fast-paced development and continuous transformation are fuelling widespread concerns and forcing governments to create legislative standards and policies to ensure that AI is safely developed while urging companies to adopt a common framework. This was at the heart of the conversation at the AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park in the U.K., where the Bletchley Declaration was officially signed, aiming to reinforce the design, development, deployment, and use of AI in a safe manner. Imran Ahmad, our Head of Technology and Co-head of Information Governance, Privacy and Cybersecurity, echoed the importance of the declaration: "It allows countries to have a framework for their respective jurisdictions, but, more importantly, allows businesses to have more certainty around what standards they should be trying to meet from a best practices standpoint."

On 7 November 2023, the FCA published the findings from its multi-firm review on anti-fraud controls and complaint handling in firms, with a focus on authorised push payment (APP) fraud.