AiFi governance: the controls required before an AI agent can spend
A bounded-autonomy model for wallets, mandates, budgets, counterparties, approvals, settlement, and financial evidence.
Use this guide when a team is moving from an agent that recommends a transaction to one that can authorize, initiate, or complete a financial action.
Define AiFi before using the label
AiFi can refer broadly to AI-native finance, agentic finance, or a particular company or institute. ARM Agency uses it here for the operating layer that governs delegated financial actions by software agents. This is a category definition, not a claim of affiliation with AiFi-branded organizations.
Authority must be machine-enforced
A system prompt is not a financial control. Allowed assets, networks, recipients, tools, per-action limits, time windows, aggregate budgets, and escalation thresholds should be enforced by deterministic policy and signing infrastructure outside the model.
Separate intent, authorization, execution, and settlement
The record should distinguish what the user or system requested, what the policy engine approved, what the agent attempted, what the payment rail executed, and what ultimately settled. Keeping these states separate supports investigation, reconciliation, and safe recovery.
Design for exception ownership
Named owners need procedures for insufficient funds, invalid signatures, price changes, compromised credentials, duplicate charges, partial fulfillment, refunds, disputes, sanctions or compliance flags, and facilitator or chain outages.
Readiness questions
- →A legal or accountable principal delegates a bounded mandate.
- →Policy and signing controls are independent of model output.
- →Counterparties and resources can be allowlisted or risk-classified.
- →Every action produces an immutable correlation and evidence trail.
- →Finance, security, and operations owners agree on exception handling.
What a scoped next step can deliver
- →AiFi authority and mandate model
- →Wallet and budget control matrix
- →Financial-action state machine
- →Audit, reconciliation, and incident-response requirements
Need help applying this to your operating context?
We begin by clarifying the decision, scope, ownership, and constraints. The appropriate next step may be a diagnostic, a workshop, a bounded implementation, or a respectful no-go decision.
Design bounded financial autonomy →