Article by Adam French: “…Bank of England Chief Economist Huw Pill reveals the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) is using AI, web-scraping and real-time financial data to improve its understanding of the economy – with information collected by Moneyfacts among the private-sector data used to inform its assessment.
The Bank of England is turning to artificial intelligence and new sources of real-time financial data to identify economic signals that could otherwise be missed, Chief Economist Huw Pill has revealed.
Pill says the Bank is already using AI models to extract quantitative signals from qualitative information, including corporate reports, survey responses and conversations between the Bank’s regional agents and businesses.
The Bank is also using web-scraping and other technologies to develop new sources of information for monetary policy, while data science is allowing policymakers to analyse large datasets. This includes anonymised real time data on individual mortgages and bank accounts.
“We have been using AI models to draw more quantitative signals from the qualitative data coming from corporate reports, survey responses, or agents’ conversations with their business contacts across the country.”
Pill says the technology is helping the Bank distinguish genuine economic signals from louder and more volatile data. One of the biggest challenges facing modern monetary policymakers. “Extracting signal from noise has become even more important (and difficult) over the past few years.”…(More)”.
