German financial watchdog: AI is helping to catch market abuse

Germany's financial regulator BaFin is using artificial intelligence to help it spot market abuse and suspicious patterns in trading, increasing the chances of catching offenders, a top official warned on Monday.

BaFin President Mark Branson said the supervisor had started using artificial intelligence last year in its alert and market analysis system.

"We can already see from this that the results of this analysis system have become more accurate," Branson said at a conference.


"The chances of being caught in market abuse trading have never been so high, and here in Germany we know that the penalties for this can also be considerably high," he warned.

BaFin under Branson has been trying to burnish its reputation after the fall of Wirecard, a former blue-chip hailed as a German success story and once worth $28 billion.

The supervisor failed to spot accounting fraud at Wirecard ahead of its collapse in 2020, resulting in an effort to give BaFin "more bite" with a change in top leadership and more powers to spot and investigate wrongdoing.