Creating a solid basis for this confidence is BaFin’s role, which is why, in August 2018, it formulated its digitalisation strategy, setting out three basic questions:

• How should the market changes that digitalisation brings be handled in supervisory practice and regulation?
• How can BaFin ensure that innovative technologies and IT systems and the data that supervised undertakings use are secure?
• How does BaFin itself need to adapt and evolve to meet the demands of ongoing digitalisation – both internally and at its points of interaction with the market?

BaFin needs to continually reassess its digitalisation strategy in order to keep pace with the changing situation. To this end, it keeps in active contact with the financial industry, academia, politics and other authorities – a good example of this being the consultation for its report "Big data meets artificial intelligence”.

In this issue, Jörn Bartels and Dr Thomas Deckers, both from BaFin, provide an overview of the responses to this consultation, and I give my initial analysis. In an interview, Dr Jörg Kukies, State Secretary at the Federal Ministry of Finance, explains the German federal government’s planned framework for artificial intelligence. My colleague on the Executive Board, Raimund Röseler, and Ira Steinbrecher, also from BaFin, address the topic of banks outsourcing IT services. Professor Fred Wagner, who is a member of our administrative council, and Kristina Zentner, both of Leipzig University, have written about the community of policyholders in this era of Big Data and Artificial Intelligence. Dr Jörg Baron Frank von Fürstenwerth of the German Insurance Association (Gesamtverband der Deutschen Versicherungswirtschaft e.V.), and Dr Joachim Schmalzl and Frank Weigand of the German Savings Banks Association (Sparkassen- und Giroverband) report on how the insurance industry and savings banks are dealing with the challenges posed by digitalisation.

We hope you enjoy reading it.

Felix Hufeld
President of BaFin