Governing Artificial Intelligence in Finance: Innovation, Consumer Protection, Regulatory oversight

Artificial intelligence is rapidly transforming the global financial system. It is now embedded across institutions, markets, and supervisory infrastructures, from credit scoring, fraud detection, algorithmic trading, and portfolio management to insurance underwriting, anti-money laundering, and regulatory compliance. Recent advances in generative AI, large language models, foundation models, synthetic data, and agentic AI are accelerating this shift, automating complex cognitive tasks and reshaping financial products and services. AI is moving from experimental use toward core infrastructure for finance.This shift raises questions that go well beyond technology. Greater reliance on AI brings concerns around transparency, explainability, accountability, privacy, cyber-security, operational resilience, algorithmic discrimination, and systemic risk. Agentic AI adds systems that can reason, plan, and execute financial decisions with limited human oversight, moving the field from predictive analytics toward autonomous, interconnected financial ecosystems. These tools can improve efficiency, liquidity, risk management, and customer experience, but they also test existing frameworks for governance and consumer protection. Regulators have flagged operational resilience, concentration risk, market herding, third-party dependencies, and AI-enabled cyberattacks as emerging threats, warning that AI-driven cyber risk could become a source of financial instability.Research on these issues remains fragmented across finance, insurance, fintech, information systems, computer science, law, economics, and public policy, and much of it focuses on applications and performance rather than the institutional, ethical, and regulatory implications of adoption. This Research Topic brings together interdisciplinary work on how AI is reshaping financial services and what governance supports trustworthy, accountable, resilient, and human-centred innovation. We welcome theoretical, empirical, methodological, legal, and policy-oriented contributions.Potential topics include, but are not limited to: - Governance and accountability of AI in financial services - Regulation, supervision, and policy responses to AI in finance - RegTech and SupTech for oversight, compliance, and supervisory innovation - Explainable AI, transparency, and auditability - Algorithmic bias, fairness, and responsible AI in credit, investment, payments, and insurance - Consumer protection, digital vulnerability, and AI-enabled financial advice - Human-AI collaboration, oversight, and liability in autonomous financial systems - Autonomous financial agents and the future of financial intermediation - Data governance, privacy, synthetic data, and digital sovereignty - ESG, sustainability, and responsible AI in financial services - Financial inclusion and exclusion in AI-driven systems - Cyber-security, fraud detection, deepfakes, and synthetic identity risk - AI, financial stability, and market integrity - Institutional, organisational, ethical, and societal implications of AI adoption - Generative AI, foundation models, and agentic AI in financial institutions and markets Topic editors: Laura Grassi, Pantea Foroudi, Antonio Simeone Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/83895/governing-artificial-intelligence-in-finance-innovation-consumer-protection-regulatory-oversight