Zango has published research saying the UK financial services sector still lacks a shared operational standard for governing AI, leaving institutions to build oversight frameworks independently as adoption accelerates.
The report, The Future of AI Governance & Compliance in Financial Services, draws on interviews with 27 C-suite and senior leaders across risk, compliance, and AI governance at UK and European financial institutions, as well as four industry roundtables involving 60 additional senior practitioners.
Zango said the UK has not yet developed sector-specific implementation guidance for AI governance in financial services, unlike the US and Singapore, which it said published practical frameworks in February and March. In the absence of a common standard, the report said financial institutions are addressing the same oversight problems in parallel and developing governance approaches separately.
The release also points to a change in the types of systems being deployed. Financial institutions are moving from tools that produced more predictable outputs to generative and agentic systems that generate context-dependent outputs and cannot be fully validated in advance. Several institutions cited in the research said they were unable to identify all the AI tools in use across their organisations.
Lord Clement-Jones, Liberal Democrat Spokesperson for Science, Innovation and Technology in the House of Lords and Co-Chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on AI, wrote in the foreword: “What is immediately missing is the translation of high-level regulatory principles into day-to-day operational practice. We cannot simply wait for the aftermath of the first major AI-fuelled financial scandal to force us into action.”
Ritesh Singhania, CEO of Zango, said: “Compliance teams are trying to keep pace with AI systems their own colleagues have deployed, yet the UK still lacks a shared standard for governing those systems in practice. Through deploying AI agents for risk and compliance in financial services, we see firms grappling with the same challenge: turning high-level regulatory expectations into workable day-to-day governance for AI. What’s missing is a shared implementation standard that gives firms a consistent basis for governing AI as they adopt it.”
Zango said the report calls for practitioner-built, sector-specific implementation guidance developed with regulator engagement, modelled on the precedent set by the Joint Money Laundering Steering Group. Contributors to the report include senior leaders from Santander, St James’s Place, Stripe, Standard Chartered, Lloyds Banking Group, Monzo, Allica Bank, Commerzbank, Revolut, and Ecommpay.
