On April 27, 2017, the Autorité des marchés financiers (AMF) announced the creation of the Fintech Lab: a think tank equipped with exploration tools aimed at exploring the current and potential applications of new technologies by entities regulated by the AMF (e.g. financial cooperatives and other deposit-taking institutions, insurers, and market infrastructures such as stock exchanges) or in connection with activities regulated by the AMF (e.g. the business of trading in securities or advising in relation to trading in securities) and studying new technologies.

With the Fintech Lab, the AMF wishes to:

• deepen and update its understanding of new technologies;
• explore how the AMF could use new technologies to improve its own processes;
• provide advice and insight with respect to the continuous review of the regulatory framework and the regulatory sandbox initiatives of the Canadian Securities Administrators; and to
• anticipate the AMF's needs regarding expertise and computer systems.

The Fintech Lab's activities will be divided into various projects and the AMF will engage university students in engineering and technology as interns in its Lab projects, allowing the AMF to raise awareness amongst future professionals on the regulator's role in the financial markets.R3 leads a financial institution consortium focused on developing distributed ledger technologies (commonly referred to as “blockchain”) for financial markets. It currently counts more than 80 members which are among the world’s leading financial institution, including Bank of America Corp, Barclays Plc, Deutsche Bank AG and UBS Group AG, as well as Canadian institutions such as BMO, CIBC, National Bank of Canada, RBC, Scotiabank and TD and collaborates with the Bank of Canada and Payments Canada.

The AMF also announced the signing of a partnership agreement with R3 intended to allow it to gain access to relevant information about projects undertaken by other regulators, enter into project partnerships and develop its own initiatives through the contributions of other R3 members.

For more information about our firm’s Fintech expertise, please contact the authors and see our Fintech group page.