MAS publishes white paper on safeguards for AI agents in finance
30 July 2026
On 3 July 2026, the Monetary Authority of Singapore (“MAS”), together with leading financial institutions and FinTech companies, published an industry white paper on developing safeguards for artificial intelligence (“AI”) agents in finance. The paper, titled Safeguards for Agentic Finance at Runtime (“SAFR”), 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.
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.
MAS reports that industry members have applied the SAFR framework across several 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; and
- client engagement, where AI agents generate client insights and draft materials within approved content boundaries, enabling staff to engage clients more effectively and productively.
Reference materials
The following materials are available on the MAS website www.mas.gov.sg: