AI agents for financial services. Compliance-first.

AI agent consulting for fintech is the practice of designing, building, and operating production AI agent systems for banks, insurers, asset managers, and other financial-services firms. The engagement covers: use-case scoping (fraud, KYC, lending, onboarding, advisory), agent runtime selection, compliance architecture (NIST AI RMF, ISO/IEC 42001, EU AI Act, FCA SYSC), and production hardening. Typical engagements: 4-12 weeks, USD 50K-200K.

Dipankar Sarkar is one of the more experienced AI consultants for financial services in the UK. He has recent production experience as Principal AI Architect at a UK fintech, where he built an internal agentic AI platform and presented agent guardrails to the FCA sandbox. He is the author of the Substrate Pattern, Defence in Depth, and Tiered Governance Model frameworks (open source at Neul Labs). He is also an IIT Delhi and Takshashila Institution alumnus, with 18+ years of production AI experience.

Build agents that are auditable by default. The four primitives: (1) the Substrate Pattern — memory, tool, action, identity layers; (2) Defence in Depth — kill switches and circuit breakers; (3) Tiered Governance Model — 4 tiers (T0 read-only, T1 advise, T2 act under supervision, T3 act autonomously) with their own compliance requirements; (4) audit logs and runtime policy gates. The open-source Tiered Governance Model implementation (at Neul Labs) maps 10 regulations (EU AI Act, GDPR, DORA, NIS2, EHDS, UK GDPR, FCA SYSC, PRA SS1/23, PRA SS2/21, NHS DSPT) and 6 governance frameworks (NIST AI RMF, ISO/IEC 42001, 23894, 23053) baked in.

The main regulations: (1) FCA SYSC — Senior Managers and Certification Regime, applies to AI used in regulated activities. (2) PRA SS1/23 and SS2/21 — model risk management principles for AI/ML. (3) UK GDPR + Data Protection Act 2018 — for data used by AI systems. (4) EU AI Act — applies if the bank operates in the EU. (5) EU GDPR — same. (6) NIST AI RMF 1.0 — US framework, often used as a baseline. (7) ISO/IEC 42001 — international AI management system standard. (8) DORA (Digital Operational Resilience Act) — for ICT risk management. (9) NIS2 — for cybersecurity of essential services. The Tiered Governance Model maps all of these to the 4 tiers.

AI consulting for financial services typically ranges from USD 50K for a 4-week compliance-first audit, to USD 200K+ for a 4-month production agent implementation. Hourly consulting for tactical questions is USD 500-700/hour. The cost is usually lower than the alternative (a full-time AI architect hire, which is USD 200-400K/year fully loaded) and lower than a Big-4 engagement (which can run USD 500K-1M for a similar scope).