Evaluation: Public consultation on financial innovation
The Ministry of Finance of the Czech Republic is evaluating a public consultation on financial market innovations and consumer protection, which aimed to obtain stakeholders´ views on a number of issues related to new digital technologies in order to foster an innovation-friendly environment and to ensure up-to-date level of customer protection on Czech financial market. The public consultation intended to map the digital finance and financial innovation landscape in the Czech Republic.
The Ministry of Finance has prepared a public consultation on the subject in order to receive comments from the professional public on their preferred form of legal anchoring of financial market innovations and to receive their suggestion on adequate levels of consumer protection with regard to financial innovation. The public consultation was published on the website of the Ministry and number of stakeholders were approached by e-mail and invited to submit their views on the issue by 11 March 2020 at the latest. The Ministry of Finance received responses from number of subjects, including law firms, professional associations, academics and the Czech National Bank.
The public consultation covered technologies such as Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT), Artificial Intelligence (AI), Biometric Technologies, Cloud Computing, Virtual Reality etc. Although most respondents note the fundamental impact of AI and Big Data on the development of financial innovation, majority of respondents do not see the need to enact new legislation for certain categories of data and several respondents consider the existing AI legislation sufficient. Some respondents believe that this issue should be discussed at the level of the European Union and therefore it is not appropriate to create a special arrangement for these technologies at the level of each member state.
Respondents pointed out that two of the greatest obstacles to development of an innovation-friendly financial market are legal uncertainty and excessive regulation of financial services. Respondents commented on several aspect of the second Payment Services Directive, the fifth Anti-Money Laundering Directive and related Czech legislation.
Ministry of Finance of the Czech Republic published evaluation of the public consultation and summary of responses on its website (Czech language only).