FCA Seeks More AI Regulation as Agents Take Over Finance

British regulators are calling for tougher AI rules amid the rise of agentic banking services.

“AI will reshape consumer financial journeys, with people increasingly delegating to AI applications that act on their behalf,” Sheldon Mills, an executive director for the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), wrote in a report published Monday (July 6).

“Consumer demand is already emerging, suggesting a shift to agent-led journeys is credible,” the report added.

In time, artificial intelligence (AI) systems will go beyond offering information and recommendations to providing agents that can act on behalf of customers to provide financial management within agreed limits.

“If done well, this could help consumers achieve more while doing less, addressing long-standing problems such as low switching, advice and protection gaps, and improving outcomes for people with lower financial capability,” the report says. “There are both benefits and risks – for example, hyper-personalization could help better match products to needs, but also enable bias, opaque pricing and personalized manipulation.”

In an interview with the Financial Times (FT) ahead of the report, Mills said the FCA would need greater authority to keep up with AI’s rapid evolution, and called on the British government to examine whether the use of large language models like ChatGPT or Claude should be subject to their rules.

He added that financial regulators would also have to adopt AI themselves to meet the “speed, pace and scale of change” the technology is bringing to the industry and to help “monitor, detect and tackle the risks.”

“It is an arms race,” Mills told the FT.

In related news, PYMNTS spoke Monday with Maik Taro Wehmeyer, co-founder and CEO at Taktile, who argued that 2026 “is the year where AI will come to financial services.”

He told PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster that while many banks remain hesitant, a growing group has movedtoward an “agentic-first” future.

With AI solutions, Wehmeyer said, small business loans that once needed weeks of manual underwriting could potentially be OK’d in minutes, while insurance claims that had taken months could be evaluated in hours with drone imagery and AI-powered damage assessments.

“I think many people by now confuse AI transformation with cost savings,” Wehmeyer said, adding that the competitive advantage actually comes from AI’s ability to drastically reduce decision times.

“If I’m a small business owner and I’m asking for a loan, and I get the answer not within 14 days … but within five minutes, how great is that?” he said.