Insider Brief
- FINOS has launched the FINOS AI Fund, backed by founding members DTCC, Morgan Stanley, Royal Bank of Canada, and NatWest, to pool industry resources and accelerate responsible agentic AI adoption in regulated financial services.
- The Fund will operate as a member-led Supplemental Directed Fund with a dedicated Governing Board, focusing on embedding financial-grade governance requirements into open source AI standards, engaging regulators, and developing interoperable specifications for cross-firm AI workflows.
- Initial priorities include advancing the FINOS AI Governance Framework (AIGF), supporting certification approaches for enterprise AI readiness, and ensuring the financial services industry shapes, rather than merely consumes, the global AI standards being built today.
PRESS RELEASE — The Fintech Open Source Foundation (FINOS) has announced the establishment of the FINOS AI Fund and the formation of its dedicated Governing Board. Anchored by Founding Premier Members The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC), Morgan Stanley, Royal Bank of Canada (RBC), and NatWest, the Fund is designed to help the industry collectively shape the governance, standards, and implementation foundations needed for responsible agentic AI adoption in regulated financial services.
The Case for an Industry-Led AI Approach in Financial Services
General AI technology is evolving at a pace far exceeding the speed of traditional technology cycles, posing a challenge for the highly regulated financial services industry to keep pace with adoption and production deployment. As a financial services industry (FSI)-led organization, FINOS is uniquely positioned to address these challenges:
- Industry Stewardship: The regulated nature of finance requires a neutral, well-governed home for collaboration. FINOS provides an open source environment purpose-built for the needs, constraints, and regulatory expectations of financial institutions.
- Industry Interconnectedness: In an industry where mission-critical workflows like trading, settlement, and clearing routinely cross firm boundaries, fragmented AI adoption increases risk. FINOS enables shared agreement on agentic behaviors, controls, and protocols needed to support trust and interoperability across the value chain.
- Specialized Governance: Unlike many horizontal AI applications, financial services will often require a longer “human-in-the-loop” runway, along with increased transparency, oversight, and regulatory alignment. FINOS helps the industry turn high-level principles into concrete technical standards and machine-readable controls that can support adoption at scale.
The Fund accelerates industry execution by convening financial institutions to define, maintain, and operationalize the industry’s shared AI building blocks, ensuring financial services is not just a consumer of AI technology, but a lead architect of how it is adopted in regulated environments.
The FINOS AI Fund: A Mechanism for Execution
The FINOS AI Fund operates as a member-led Supplemental Directed Fund (SDF) to mutualize investment to resolve shared industry blockers and promote responsible AI adoption. By pooling resources, the Fund provides a dedicated team of subject matter experts and developers to deliver structured, outcomes-oriented results. It is steered by a member-led Governing Board of senior leaders responsible for strategic funding allocation and hands-on project prioritization.
In line with FINOS’ commitment to open innovation, outputs are intended to be developed as open source under neutral FINOS governance and in a way that supports transparent and auditable adoption across regulated environments. Participation is open to FINOS members.
Driving Outcomes and Value
A primary driver of this initiative is to move beyond siloed exploration toward a unified industry position that can engage effectively with regulators, standards bodies, and the broader open source ecosystem. The Fund acts as a catalyst to ensure financial-grade requirements are reflected in the foundations of global AI development, while also advancing financial services-led open source collaboration. Initial focus areas include:
- Upstreaming Financial-Grade Requirements: Helping embed financial services requirements for governance, security, observability, and control into broadly adopted open source AI projects and standards through active participation in relevant horizontal and Linux Foundation initiatives.
- Regulatory and Industry Alignment: Engaging regulators, industry bodies, and ecosystem stakeholders to help translate emerging policy expectations into practical, open, and technically implementable approaches for regulated AI adoption.
- Governance-as-Code Enablement: Advancing the FINOS AI Governance Framework (AIGF), CALM, and Common Cloud Controls (CCC) as complementary open building blocks for machine-readable controls, reference architectures, and runtime oversight in regulated AI environments.
- FSI-Led Specifications and Conformance: Developing common specifications, reference implementations, and conformance approaches to support interoperable, production-ready intra- and inter-firm agentic AI workflows across firms, vendors, and platforms.
- Certification and Market Readiness: Supporting assessment and certification approaches that help validate open source projects, standards, products, implementations, protocols, and formats for enterprise financial services use.
- Skills and Community Activation: Expanding AIGF training, certification, and community participation to strengthen industry readiness and cross-sector collaboration around AI governance and implementation.
Executive Perspectives
“The FINOS AI Fund is about moving from exploration to measurable outcomes,” said Gabriele Columbro, Executive Director of FINOS. “As open source continues to reshape technology stacks, the Fund and its Governing Board are uniquely positioned to look across the industry to identify where effort should be focused in order to deliver the strongest ROI for the industry across agentic AI, controls, training & certification, and shared utilities.”
“As AI becomes embedded into mission-critical workflows, we need a shared baseline for how governance is understood and applied,” said Madhu Coimbatore, Managing Director, Head of Firmwide AI Platform, Morgan Stanley, and FINOS AI Governing Board representative “At Morgan Stanley we actively leverage the FINOS AI Governance Framework in new vendor onboarding and we encourage AI, risk, and engineering leaders across the industry to take a similar approach — so teams can operationalize AIGF consistently across organizations and suppliers.”
“The AIGF is made by FSIs, for FSIs,” said Johnna Powell, Managing Director and Head of Technology, Research and Innovation at DTCC. “By aligning the industry around practical standards that can be implemented at scale, we can help make agentic AI adoption more responsible and grounded in the realities of regulated financial services.”
“Open source is fundamental to how financial services innovates — and by actively participating in its development, we help shape not just the foundations we depend on today, but the innovations we’ll all rely on tomorrow,” said Bhupesh Vora, Europe Head of Capital Markets Quantitative & Technology Services RBC. “As agentic AI moves from pilot to production, the decisions the industry makes now will determine how safely and sustainably it scales. It takes this kind of collective effort to turn responsible AI from a pledge into a practice. We’re proud to be part of building that together.”
Engage with the FINOS AI Fund
Financial institutions, technology providers, regulators, standards bodies, and open source communities interested in collaborating on financial services requirements for responsible AI adoption can learn more and contact FINOS at ai.finos.org.
FINOS members interested in influencing the priorities and work of the FINOS AI Fund are invited to learn more about joining at ai.finos.org/ai-fund.
About the FINOS AI Fund
The FINOS AI Fund is a member-led Supplemental Directed Fund dedicated to accelerating production AI adoption in financial services. By mutualizing investment, the Fund reduces fragmentation by aligning industry-specific requirements with global open-source standards and regulatory bodies. Proceeds support a dedicated team of researchers and developers executing workstreams prioritized by an industry Governing Board responsible for strategic funding allocation and market advocacy. Learn more at ai.finos.org.
About the FINOS AI Governance Framework (AIGF)
The FINOS AI Governance Framework for Financial Services (AIGF) is an open source framework designed to help financial institutions adopt, adapt, and extend practical AI governance in regulated environments. AIGF emphasizes transparency and trust, supporting consistent risk identification and mitigation, and enabling repeatable adoption patterns across internal deployments and third-party onboarding.
About FINOS
FINOS (The Fintech Open Source Foundation) unites the financial services industry to build open technologies and standards that enhance profitability, improve resilience, and accelerate innovation. FINOS is the trusted community designed by regulated industry participants to solve industry-wide challenges and drive operational excellence and financial technology innovation. As part of the Linux Foundation, FINOS provides a neutral, well-governed home for open source collaboration across the industry. With a global community of more than 100 member organizations including major financial institutions, fintechs, and technology firms, FINOS advances open standards and production-grade open source for finance. This work embeds these technologies and standards into the core workflows, platforms, and policies of financial institutions, making them essential to how the industry builds, operates, and evolves. FINOS advocates for a clear focus on measurable ROI from open source adoption.
Learn more at www.finos.org.
Media Contact (FINOS):
Tosha Ellison
Research and Communications, FINOS
tosha.ellison@finos.org
+1 (415) 215 3563
