Toss' financial management research institute, Toss Insights, published a report analyzing how artificial intelligence (AI) is changing the structure of decision-making in finance. It said AI is affecting evaluation, judgment and execution beyond simply improving efficiency in financial work, and that expanded financial access and securing fairness are emerging as simultaneous tasks.

Toss Insights said on Sunday it published the first report in its "AI finance research series," titled "AI, Redrawing the History of Finance."

The report organizes the concept of AI finance and research trends over the past 25 years. It defined finance as a process of assessing an uncertain future, making decisions such as lending and investment, and executing them through actual transactions and services. AI finance refers to the changes that appear as AI is used in that process.

Toss Insights analyzed that as AI and finance combine, the main agent in financial decision-making is shifting from rules set by people to models and algorithms trained on data. It said AI finance affects how decision criteria themselves are formed, such as in loan screening or investment judgments. It added that final responsibility and approval authority still rest with people and institutions.

The report reviewed literature related to AI and finance using major academic databases such as Scopus and Web of Science. Researchers organized research trends around 34 core papers out of about 25,000 documents published over the past 25 years.

The report pointed out that as AI becomes more deeply involved in financial judgment processes, explainability, fairness and human oversight become more important. It said key conditions for using financial AI have become whether AI judgments can be explained, whether they produce unfavorable outcomes for specific groups, and whether humans are providing sufficient oversight.

As a representative example, it cited AI-based credit scoring used in mobile loan screening. It also identified as tasks the potential for a competition gap depending on the amount of data held and for fairness disputes if outcomes are unfavorable to specific groups.

Roh Yoo-chul (노유철), a research fellow on the Digital Finance Research Team at Toss Insights, said, "The combination of AI and finance does not stop at adopting a specific technology, but is affecting how financial decisions are formed." He added, "I hope this report will be a starting point for understanding AI finance."