The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), the city state’s central bank and financial regulator, has joined forces with major financial institutions and FinTechs to release a white paper setting out how AI agents operating in finance can be kept safe, secure and dependable.
The paper, called Safeguards for Agentic Finance at Runtime (SAFR), puts forward a framework created by the industry itself, designed to let AI agents perform financial tasks without straying beyond acceptable limits.
It has been produced under the regulator’s BuildFin.ai initiative, a programme that backs the responsible creation and rollout of AI tools across the financial sector.
The push comes as AI agents take on more autonomous work at a pace that makes hands-on human oversight impractical. In response, firms require real-time controls capable of keeping agent behaviour inside the mandates, policies and risk limits they have defined. SAFR addresses this through a series of governance checkpoints that check and log what an agent intends to do before any task is carried out.
The framework extends the AI Risk Management toolkit produced through MAS’ Project Mindforge, concentrating on how protections can be put into practice at the moment an agent acts.
The white paper maps out how measures such as policy bound execution, real time validation, auditability and interoperability can be woven into system operations, giving institutions the confidence to deploy agents consistently.
Industry participants have already tested SAFR across several scenarios. These include agent-assisted payments and treasury work, where agents handle routine transactions within set mandates to cut operational friction; wealth management and advisory processes, where agents examine documents and produce structured assessments inside tightly defined task limits to speed up compliance checks; and client engagement, where agents draft materials and surface client insights within approved content parameters, helping staff serve clients more productively.
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