The Fintech Open Source Foundation (FINOS), the financial services umbrella of the Linux Foundation, announced multiple artificial intelligence (AI) milestones, including the draft release of a an AI Governance Framework for financial institutions amid broader AI initiatives.
“It’s exciting to see how the FINOS membership has come together in a relatively short period of time to work on these important foundational guidelines for deploying AI in the complex and regulated financial services world,” said FINOS executive director Gabrielle Columbro, in a statement. “As the world awakens to the fundamental role open source AI will play in the economy, social improvement and responsible innovation, we welcome the addition of new landmark names and increased commitment of our existing members as we shepherd the industry beyond AI readiness and into building collaborative open source AI for such a critical infrastructure like financial services.”
“NVIDIA software is enabling rapid development of accelerated computing and AI in financial services, helping bring new data capabilities to firms,” said Jochen Papenbrock, head of Financial Technology for EMEA at NVIDIA. “NVIDIA is enhancing its community engagement by joining the FINOS project, bolstering a long-standing commitment to contributing to open source AI and data processing.”
NVIDIA provides AI software like NVIDIA Guardrails, NeMo and RAPIDS to support the adoption of faster, more efficient computing models in financial services. NVIDIA software also enhances climate risk applications, helps conserve energy and supports environmental and climate risk initiatives, including through the NVIDIA Earth-2 platform, carbon capture, and environmental, social and governance risk analysis.
AI Governance Framework for Financial Services
The power of generative AI, which can enable users to better leverage proprietary and public data and information in use cases that touch everything from trading to preventing financial crime to regulatory reporting to improving customer experiences, will be transformative.
Since FINOS launched its broader AI initiative earlier this year, it was clear that accelerating AI readiness was a critical first step. AI presents new challenges for onboarding technology in financial services that must be addressed to allow for its rapid, safe and trustworthy adoption – building the right guardrails and considering the needs of the customer, the organization and the regulatory environment.
Following months of members-only collaboration, the AI Readiness special interest group (SIG) launched its AI Governance Framework draft, which is vendor-agnostic and outlines 15 risks and 15 controls specifically tailored for AI systems leveraging LLM paradigms in financial services (FS). It is designed to be a ‘living document’ that addresses current and new threats and builds upon existing risk frameworks.
Madhu Coimbatore, head of AI Development Platforms at Morgan Stanley, said in a statement: “While we have deployed AI solutions for many years, generative AI is poised to disrupt how we do business, creating new opportunities but also introducing challenges and risks. It’s important that regulated financial services companies apply rigor and discipline to ensure safe and trustworthy deployment of this technology.
“This is a great starting point for us, as an industry, to collaborate on a structured approach to the adoption and governance of AI similar to what we did through the Open Source Readiness program a few years back.”
As a critical next step in finalizing the AI Governance Framework and adopting responsible AI practices, FINOS is inviting the wider financial services community to participate in this important collaboration. The task is to develop and operationalize frameworks, policies and tools for the effective, safe, trustworthy and compliant deployment of generative AI technologies.