Britain's financial regulator plans to automate as much of its supervision and enforcement as it can with artificial intelligence, its data chief told lawmakers on Tuesday. The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) is not preparing new AI rules for the industry, the Financial Times reported.
London's trading industry is coming home!
For regulated firms, that puts software on the reading end of what they send the watchdog. Jessica Rusu, the FCA 's chief data, information and intelligence officer, said AI works well on the emails, documents and interview records firms provide.
Outside the perimeter, research commissioned for the Mills Review found that a fifth of UK adults are open to letting AI models make financial decisions for them. Savings and borrowing were among the examples.
Rusu is due to set out the FCA's formal answer to that review in a speech next week. Former FCA executive Sheldon Mills delivered it in July with seven priority recommendations and an AI-enabled supervisory model.
Agents Already Touch Client Accounts
Retail brokers are not waiting. At least ten brokers and platform vendors connected AI agents to live client accounts in the first half of 2026, and Anthropic's Claude powered nine of them, an FM Intelligence study found.
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eToro began letting investors hand trades to their own AI agents in March. The agents run in sub-accounts with a set budget and scoped access.
In June, ThinkMarkets launched ChelseaAI, an MCP server that lets a trader's AI assistant place orders but can block it from client funds. In each case the authorized firm is the broker holding the account, not the developer of the model.
Rathi Still Weighing the Perimeter
The Mills Review said the regulator would need greater powers to keep up with AI. It also urged UK authorities to consider whether ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and other large language models should fall under their rules, according to the FT.
Chief Executive Nikhil Rathi told the House of Commons Treasury Committee on Tuesday that his thinking on AI had been evolving. He is still not convinced the FCA needs "lots more powers" until it has shown it has used its existing powers to the fullest extent.
A model that gives information without an individual recommendation that results in a transaction does not fall fully inside the regulated perimeter, he said. That applies to advice, insurance and other markets.
"I think that is going to be a very live discussion," Rathi said. The open point is where to draw the line.
Automation Inside the Regulator
Building "an AI-enabled agentic supervisory model" was one of the Mills recommendations. Rusu said the FCA is deploying AI in ways that keep its officials overseeing and directing the work, and that it is looking at embedding it in authorizations, supervision and enforcement.
The regulator wants to go "further than that, to automate wherever we can . . . and to intervene at scale," she said.
FCA staff have visited firms to see how they use AI and will publish their findings on good and poor practice next week, Rusu said. The AI Live Testing service opened in December 2025 with NatWest, Monzo, Santander and Scottish Widows in the first cohort.
The testing follows a sandbox that gave banks NVIDIA computing power to trial AI models in June 2025.
Five months later the FCA agreed to test AI tools jointly with the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS).
The FCA's first technology horizon scan in June named AI as one of three shifts likely to reshape financial services by 2030.
