In a speech at Bloomberg’s UK Policy Series, Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) Chief Data, Information and Intelligence Officer Jessica Rusu outlined how the regulator is embedding six of the Mills Review’s seven recommendations into live work, focusing on testing, assurance and supervision. Following the July review of how AI could reshape retail financial services by 2030, the FCA will work with industry, other regulators and frontier AI laboratories to develop a framework for agentic finance covering agent identity, delegated authority, accountability and execution. Rusu also previewed a joint survey with the Bank of England showing that 86% of firms now use AI. For firms deploying AI, Rusu highlighted consumer outcomes, governance and operational resilience, alongside the publication of good and poor practice examples drawn from testing. Firms should define the consumer need before developing tools, provide access to human support and establish clear senior management accountability before deployment. They should stress-test systems, maintain fallback options and understand dependencies on suppliers and individual models. Increasingly autonomous systems require continuous, conditional assurance because their behaviour can change under stress, at scale or following model updates. Rusu stressed that reporting of major incidents must extend to significant AI failures and near misses. The FCA is also calling on general-purpose AI providers to use clear, proportionate and consistent disclaimers explaining the limits of financial information and advice generated by their models. Only 40% of consumers correctly recognise that they have no recourse after acting on advice from such tools. Rather than develop the new public-interest financial capability tool proposed by the Mills Review, the FCA will build on existing initiatives that help investors detect scams and challenge unreliable AI outputs. Internally, it is developing AI tools to oversee 60,000 anti-money laundering firms entering its remit in 2028 and agentic tools to support supervision of approximately 9,000 small wholesale markets transaction reporting firms.
UK Financial Conduct Authority sets out implementation of six Mills Review recommendations and safeguards for agentic finance
At Bloomberg’s UK Policy Series, Financial Conduct Authority Chief Data, Information and Intelligence Officer Jessica Rusu outlined implementation of six Mills Review recommendations and plans for a framework governing agentic finance. Firms should establish accountability before AI deployment, maintain continuous assurance and fallback arrangements, and report significant AI failures and near misses. The FCA also called for general-purpose AI providers to explain the limits of their financial information and advice through clear disclaimers.