Published Date: 03 July 2026
Safeguards for Agentic Finance at Runtime (SAFR) proposes a framework for the governance of AI agents in financial services, defining how agent actions are authorised, how human oversight is activated, and what is recorded at the point of every decision.
The paper also discusses implementation considerations for institutions deploying SAFR in their agentic AI systems. SAFR is jointly developed by the financial industry under MAS’ BuildFin.ai initiative.
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.
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 policy-bound execution, real-time validation, auditability and interoperability as core pillars.
SAFR is a reference approach — it does not constitute regulatory guidance or supervisory expectations. Each institution remains responsible for determining how its deployment aligns with applicable supervisory expectations.
The Future of Finance Institute will support future adoption of the SAFR framework through industry pilots and sandbox experimentation.
Pilot use cases include agent-assisted payments and treasury, wealth management compliance review, and client engagement drafting.