MAS Partners Industry to develop Safeguards for AI Agents in Finance

Singapore, 3 July 2026… The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), together with leading financial institutions and FinTechs, today published an industry white paper on developing safeguards for AI agents in Finance. Titled "Safeguards for Agentic Finance at Runtime (SAFR) ", the paper proposes an industry-developed framework that enables AI agents in financial services to carry out financial tasks safely, securely and reliably. SAFR is developed under MAS' BuildFin.ai initiative, which supports the responsible development and deployment of AI solutions in the financial sector.

2. As AI agents in financial services increasingly carry out tasks autonomously and at speed beyond practical human intervention, financial institutions need real-time safeguards to ensure that the behaviour of AI agents remain within predefined mandates, policies and risk boundaries set by financial institutions. The SAFR framework provides for a set of governance checkpoints that verifies and records an AI agent's proposed actions before the execution of its tasks.

3. SAFR builds on MAS' Project Mindforge's AI Risk Management toolkit, with a focus on how safeguards can be operationalised at the point of action for AI agents. The SAFR white paper sets out the direction for how these safeguards, including policy bound execution, real time validation, auditability and interoperability, can be embedded into system operations so that financial institutions can deploy AI agents with trust and consistency.

4. Industry members have applied the SAFR framework across use cases, including:

• Agent-assisted payments and treasury operations, where autonomous agents can execute routine transactions within predefined mandates, improving efficiency and reducing operational frictions;
• Wealth management and advisory workflows, where AI agents review documents and generate structured assessments within narrowly scoped task boundaries, supporting faster and more consistent compliance review;
• Client engagement, where AI agents generate client insights and draft materials within approved content boundaries, enabling staff to engage clients more effectively and productively.

5. Interested industry partners are invited to join the BuildFin.ai work group to contribute to and help shape subsequent iterations of SAFR. The recently announced Future of Finance Institute (FFI) will support future adoption of the SAFR framework through the facilitation of industry pilots and sandbox experimentation. This will help financial institutions to test and deploy SAFR-aligned solutions. Expression of interest can be made to MAS here.

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