Verifoxx Wins FRIL £50,000 Responsible AI Award to Advance Assurance for Financial Services AI Agents
27 October 2026 | London, UK
Verifoxx has been awarded £50,000 through the Financial Regulation Innovation Lab (FRIL) to develop technology that enables financial institutions to intervene when AI agents exhibit abnormal behaviour. The Financial Regulation Innovation Lab is a collaboration between FinTech Scotland and the University of Strathclyde.
The award follows FRIL's six-week Responsible AI Innovation Challenge, which brought together 14 fintech participants and 13 global financial and professional services firms - Atos, Baillie Gifford, Barclays, BlackRock, CMS, Equifax, EY, HSBC, Lloyds Banking Group, M&G, NatWest, PwC and Sopra Steria - to shape innovations around real industry challenges. The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) also participated, providing a regulatory perspective.
The award will support a three-month research and development project, Closed-Loop Assurance for Financial Services AI Agents, building on Verifoxx's SentinelOps technology, which is being advanced through £525,000 of Innovate UK Sovereign AI Phase 2 funding.
SentinelOps provides independent runtime assurance, addressing an important challenge with increasingly autonomous AI agents: individual actions may be authorised, while their combined behaviour gradually moves beyond the original task or intended objective.
The FRIL project will extend SentinelOps from detecting behavioural deviations to enabling proportionate intervention at runtime. Verifoxx will develop an intervention adapter that converts an assurance verdict into an appropriate control action, including restricting, pausing or containing AI activity, or requiring human approval.
The technology will also produce traceable assurance evidence helping financial institutions demonstrate not only that controls were triggered, but whether they were effective.
Designed for both individual AI agents and multi-agent workflows, the approach provides an additional layer of assurance beyond traditional permissions and output checks. It is also privacy-preserving, allowing sensitive customer information and detailed operational records to remain within the institution's environment.
Verifoxx will work with FRIL financial-services industry partners to define real-world use cases, establish relevant performance measures and evaluate the technology in controlled test environments. The project represents an important step in bringing SentinelOps into financial services, with the aim of progressing towards future industry pilots.
Róisín McCarthy, CEO and Founder of Verifoxx, said:
“As an SME developing frontier AI, one of our biggest challenges is moving from R&D into real-world deployment. Scotland, through FRIL, is leading the way in bridging this gap. This funding allows us to work closely with financial-services partners, develop technology that has real product market fit as well as support our growth plans in Scotland.
Bala Subramanyan, CTO and Co-Founder of Verifoxx, said:
“Financial institutions understand what they want their AI agents to do, but translating that into technical rules for monitoring behaviour is complex. SentinelOps does that work, turning business requirements into boundaries against which AI behaviour can be assessed. The FRIL project will take this a step further, enabling the system to respond when those boundaries are crossed and produce verifiable evidence that the intervention worked.”
Clare Reid, Strategic Innovation Director at FinTech Scotland, commented:
“Bringing fintechs, leading firms and the FCA together to solve industry problems in meeting the requirements of regulation has proven a successful way to boost innovation. For the four awardees, the funding will accelerate responsible and explainable AI solutions that make a real difference to the businesses adopting them, their customers and the wider economy.”
--ENDS–
Notes to editors
For media inquiries, interviews, or further details, please contact: PR@verifoxx.com
About Verifoxx
Verifoxx builds trust infrastructure for data and AI: defining what systems are authorised to do, enabling privacy-preserving execution, and independently assessing whether they behaved as trusted agents, within one coherent architecture.
About the Financial Regulation Innovation Lab (FRIL)
The Financial Regulation Innovation Lab is a Glasgow-based centre of excellence focused on advancing UK financial regulation through research, innovation and industry collaboration. Part of Scottish Enterprise’s Scaling Innovation Mission, the programme will be delivered by FinTech Scotland with the University of Strathclyde. It supports the Scottish Government’s Innovation and Economic Strategies and the UK’s Modern Industrial Strategy positioning the UK as a leader in the global financial services innovation landscape.
FRIL programme announcement
Read FinTech Scotland's announcement of the Responsible AI funding awards here.
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