TL;DR

Jessica Rusu, who runs data, information and intelligence at the Financial Conduct Authority, told MPs on 13 October that the regulator plans to hand as much supervision and enforcement work to AI as possible. Her words to the Commons Treasury Committee were “to automate wherever we can” and “to intervene at scale”. At the same session, chief executive Nikhil Rathi said he was not yet persuaded the FCA needed “lots more powers”, and it is not writing AI-specific rules for firms. The Financial Times reported the plans on 15 October.

According to Rusu, AI is already reading the unstructured material firms supply, such as correspondence and interview notes, so case officers can move faster when authorising, supervising and investigating firms. A human still owns every decision “for now”.

Agents on regulatory returns

One of the first jobs for the FCA’s agentic tool, Rathi said, has been tidying regulatory returns. Where a firm’s numbers fail to reconcile, the tool contacts the firm itself, which frees supervisors for riskier work. Rusu also wants to “shift left”, stopping problems at the gateway before a firm starts trading.

The direction comes from the Mills Review, published in July by Sheldon Mills, a former FCA executive. Among its recommendations were an AI-enabled, agentic approach to supervision and greater powers for the regulator. It also asked whether ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and similar models should be brought under financial rules. The FT reports that one in five UK adults surveyed for the review were willing to let an AI system take money decisions on their behalf.

Where the perimeter sits

Rathi told the committee that a chatbot offering general information, with no personal recommendation that ends in a transaction, is not wholly inside the regulated perimeter. That line is “a very live discussion”, he said, and regulating large language models as such would be a question for Parliament.

Looking forward

A formal FCA response to the Mills Review should come from Rusu in a speech expected in the week after the FT’s report, along with what staff learned from visiting firms about good and bad AI practice. The regulator’s AI Live Testing service launched in December 2025; its first cohort included Monzo, NatWest, Scottish Widows and Santander. In our view, the change UK firms will feel first is not a rulebook but software reading their returns and filings and raising discrepancies on its own. Start-ups building consumer AI money assistants should follow the perimeter debate, which Rathi has left open.

We could not find a published transcript of the session, so quotes are as reported by Dealroom, Finance Magnates and the FT.