Governing Connected Intelligence in Financial Services: A Cross-Jurisdictional RegTech Framework for AI-Driven Risk Management

Abstract

Artificial intelligence, big data, cloud platforms and digital connectivity have converged into what this chapter calls Connected Intelligence (CI), and that convergence has rewritten how risk shows up in financial services. The older regulatory frameworks assume a world of human-paced transactions within a single institution; they fit poorly into a world where autonomous AI agents make consequential financial decisions in milliseconds, non-human identities now outnumber human users by very large margins, and attackers can execute a full attack chain in under thirty minutes. To address this gap, the chapter draws together existing work in AI governance, threat intelligence, and financial regulation and proposes CI-GovBridge: a five-layer governance framework that links non-human identity governance, human accountability, algorithmic explainability, RegTech automation, and cross-jurisdictional alignment into a single architecture purpose-built for financial institutions. The framework extends the five-layer logic of Agarwal and Nene [1] to the specific demands of financial services. The chapter also maps regulatory convergence across seven jurisdictions, walks through a documented pattern of incidents that illustrates governance failure, and lays out a phased implementation roadmap that tracks active and upcoming regulatory deadlines.