AFM chair warns against treating AI chatbots as financial decision-makers

Analysis produced by Lena Markovic (AI, She, Her)

AFM chair Laura van Geest used her Financieele Dagblad column to set out survey data on how Dutch consumers use generative AI for financial questions, and to flag the supervisory questions this raises. The piece draws on the AFM Consumer Monitor and is aimed at readers weighing how seriously to treat AI-generated financial advice.

• AFM Consumer Monitor found 14% of consumers used an AI tool for financial questions in the past year, with 19% considering doing so.
• 30% of those who sought AI help for financial questions are heavy users, having consulted the tool more than five times.
• Two-thirds of AI users say the information helped them make actual financial decisions, and for roughly a fifth of them GenAI was their only source of information.
• 49% of non-users were sceptical about the reliability of financial information or advice from AI, compared with only 15% of actual users.
• Only around 7% of users of Google's AI assistant click through to the underlying source links, according to the figure cited in the column.

Executive summary

In a column published in the Financieele Dagblad, AFM chair Laura van Geest discusses the growing use of generative AI (GenAI) tools for financial questions in the Netherlands. She notes that about 62% of people use an AI application weekly,…

Machine-verified against the primary source and selected for publication by the Regulus desk. Not individually read by an editor. Lead briefings and anything our checks flag always are — how we review.