By PYMNTS | October 19, 2026
The United Kingdom’s Financial Conduct Authority plans to develop a framework for agentic finance that encompasses agent identity, delegated authority, accountability and execution, Jessica Rusu, chief data, information and intelligence officer at the FCA, said Monday (Oct. 19).
In a speech delivered at Bloomberg’s UK Policy Series, Rusu said the FCA will develop the framework in collaboration with industry, other regulators and frontier labs.
“Our aim is to create the conditions in which agentic finance can thrive, with innovation and consumer protection built together from the start,” Rusu said.
As artificial intelligence moves from helping users understand things to acting on the user’s behalf, there are new forms of risk. These include potential for consumer harm, cyber vulnerabilities and operational failures, Rusu said.
“Our rules already require firms to report major incidents, and that must extend to significant AI failures and near-misses,” Rusu said. “As the AI minister has recognized, near-miss reporting for agentic AI is becoming a national security priority. It is a regulatory priority too.”
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“It also means thinking differently about assurance,” Rusu said. “A system that is safe at deployment may behave differently at scale, under stress or as the models beneath it change. Agentic systems therefore require continuous, conditional assurance.”
The PYMNTS Intelligence report “Financial Service Pulls Ahead in the Enterprise AI Race” found in May that financial services and insurance firms based in the United States most adopted AI use cases in structured, auditable back-office functions, such as revenue recognition, credit risk assessment and sales forecasting. The share of these firms that use AI for customer-focused tasks is smaller.
Another PYMNTS Intelligence report, “Consumers Stop Sampling AI and Start Relying on It,” found in February that a growing percentage of American “mainstream users” and “power users” of AI are relying on the technology to make financial decisions.
During her Monday speech, Rusu highlighted a publication released Monday by the FCA, “AI in financial services: good practices and areas for improvement,” saying it gives firms practical guidance and examples on how to deploy AI.
Rusu highlighted examples of firms putting consumers first by training a chatbot to flag consumers who may need support from human advisers, implementing governance by establishing an independent ethics panel to study proposed AI use cases before they are deployed and developing operational resilience by stress-testing AI systems.
“Overall, our good and poor practice finds that both firms and consumers benefit from well-deployed systems,” Rusu said. “Even AI deployed purely for internal efficiency passes value to consumers through better-run firms, more competitive pricing and faster service.”
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