The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), the UK’s financial services regulator, has set out how it plans to supervise the move towards agentic finance, warning that autonomous AI could amplify consumer harm, cyber weaknesses and operational breakdowns at far greater speed and scale.
Jessica Rusu, the FCA’s chief data, information and intelligence officer, outlined the agenda at Bloomberg’s UK Policy Series.
At the centre of the speech was a call for firms to treat AI failures as reportable events. Existing rules already oblige firms to flag major incidents, and Rusu argued this obligation must cover significant AI breakdowns and near-misses.
She added that agentic systems will need continuous, conditional assurance, since a model judged safe at launch may act differently under stress, at scale or as underlying models shift. The regulator intends to work with industry, other regulators and frontier labs on a trusted framework covering agent identity, delegated authority, accountability and execution.
Adoption is already widespread. A joint survey with the Bank of England, due for release next week, found that 86% of firms now use AI, while global AI spending is forecast to exceed $2.6 trillion this year.
Consumer exposure is also growing outside the regulated perimeter. Four in five less-experienced investors aged 18 to 40 have turned to AI for investing help, yet only 40% of consumers understand they have no recourse if advice from a general-purpose AI tool goes wrong. Rather than widening its remit, the FCA is asking AI providers to add clear, proportionate and consistent disclaimers to financial content their models generate.
The regulator has also published good and poor practice based on firm testing carried out this year, built around three themes: consumer centricity, accountability and governance, and operational resilience.
Positive examples included a chatbot that uses a live list of vulnerability signals to pass at-risk customers to human advisers, and an independent ethics panel that reviews AI use cases before launch. Weaker practice included building tools without a defined need, excluding vulnerable consumers by default and bolting on governance after deployment.
The FCA regulates the UK’s financial services industry and commissioned the Mills Review, published in July, on how AI could reshape retail financial services by 2030. It is embedding six of the review’s seven recommendations into live work.
The FCA is also deploying AI internally. It is building tools to oversee 60,000 anti-money laundering firms entering its remit in 2028, and a market first responder agent to supervise around 9,000 small wholesale markets transaction reporting firms. Following the August launch of its Handbook API, it is now developing machine-readable data collection APIs.
FCA chief data, information and intelligence officer Jessica Rusu said, “AI should improve consumer outcomes, not simply automate existing processes.”
She added, “AI is moving faster than any regulatory framework was designed. That means regulators will increasingly need to make judgements without precedent, while ensuring that trust remains at the heart of financial services.”
Copyright © 2026 RegTech Analyst
Copyright © 2026 RegTech Analyst
