Finance
German financial watchdog: AI is helping to catch market abuse
Published by Global Banking & Finance Review®
Posted on June 2, 2025
1 min readLast updated: January 23, 2026
Global Banking & Finance Review®
Company
Published by Global Banking & Finance Review®
Posted on June 2, 2025
1 min readLast updated: January 23, 2026
BaFin leverages AI to enhance market abuse detection, improving accuracy and increasing the likelihood of catching offenders.
FRANKFURT (Reuters) -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.
(Reporting by Tom Sims, Editing by Louise Heavens)
BaFin is utilizing artificial intelligence to identify market abuse and suspicious trading patterns, enhancing the effectiveness of its alert and market analysis system.
Mark Branson noted that the results from the AI analysis system have become more accurate, increasing the likelihood of catching offenders involved in market abuse.
Branson warned that the chances of being caught in market abuse trading are high, and the penalties for such offenses in Germany can be significantly severe.
The fall of Wirecard, which involved significant accounting fraud that BaFin failed to detect, led to efforts to empower the regulator with more authority and a change in leadership.
The integration of AI in financial regulation is crucial as it helps regulators like BaFin to more effectively monitor trading activities and prevent market abuse.
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