Building agents for banking is 30% AI work and 70% compliance plumbing. The 30% is the easy part. Here's how to handle the 70%.
The first time you build an underwriting agent for a bank, you'll write the credit logic in about a week. Then you'll spend the next two months on audit logging, explainability, human-in-the-loop checkpoints, and data residency and you'll understand why fintech AI projects take longer than the demo suggests.
This is the architecture that gets through an audit, using loan underwriting as the running example.
The Core Requirement: Every Decision Must Be Traceable
Regulators don't accept "the model gave it a score of 0.82." They want to know what data was used, what reasoning was applied, and what a human would need to review to understand and challenge the decision.
