The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), the UK’s financial services regulator, has urged AI providers to place clear disclaimers on financial content produced by their models, as its chief data, information and intelligence officer Jessica Rusu set out how the watchdog plans to supervise a sector rapidly handing decisions to autonomous systems.

Speaking at Bloomberg’s UK Policy Series, Rusu said the regulator is publishing examples of good and poor AI practice gathered from firm testing this year. The guidance centres on three themes: putting consumers first, clear accountability and governance, and operational resilience.

It will be revised as the technology develops. Rusu also confirmed the FCA is acting on six of the seven recommendations from the Mills Review, published in July, which examined how AI could transform retail financial services by 2030.

Adoption has accelerated sharply. A joint survey with the Bank of England, due next week, finds that 86% of firms now use AI. Consumer behaviour is shifting too. Four in five less-experienced investors aged 18 to 40 have turned to AI for investing help, yet only 40% of consumers understand they have no route to redress if advice from a general-purpose AI tool goes wrong. Rather than widening its remit, the FCA intends to sharpen the line between regulated and unregulated activity.

On governance, the regulator criticised firms that bolt on oversight after deployment or build tools without a defined purpose. It praised one firm that built a live register of vulnerability signals allowing its chatbot to route at-risk customers to human advisers, and another that created an independent ethics panel to vet AI projects before launch.

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