AI financial products must be designed and operated to advance the financial interests of the consumer as their primary objective, rather than for the entity, its commercial partners, or third parties.
Financial Well-Being Conditions
- The entity that offers the product has a clear commitment to building financial well-being.
- The entity has an explicit and clearly articulated commitment to build the financial wellness of users included in a meaningful document, not just limited to marketing materials.
- The entity utilizes data-driven metrics to demonstrate that its product or service supports consumer financial well-being.
- The entity regularly measures users’ financial well-being with an established scale such as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s scale and includes the score as a key performance indicator.
- The product’s recommendations are tailored to the user’s expressed financial situation and constraints.
- Recommendations and other outputs the product generates are responsive to the user’s expressed needs.
- The product does not provide recommendations that might harm the user in the context of their expressed financial situation.
Consumer-First Design Obligation
- The product is designed, trained, and deployed with the consumer’s financial interests as its primary optimization objective.
- Where the entity or its partners have financial interests that differ from the consumer’s, the product’s recommendations and outputs reflect the consumer’s interests, not the entity’s.
- The entity can demonstrate, through documentation of its development and fine-tuning processes, that consumer financial outcomes are used as primary success metrics, as opposed to performance indicators such as engagement, revenue, or partner satisfaction.
- When the entity becomes aware that a product feature or behavior is systematically producing outcomes that benefit the entity at the consumer’s expense, that feature or behavior is remediated promptly regardless of its commercial value.
Conflict of Interest Management
- The entity identifies, discloses, and manages all conflicts between its commercial interests and the consumer’s financial interests.
- The entity maintains a documented inventory of actual and potential conflicts of interest arising from its business model, partner relationships, and revenue sources.
- Conflicts of interest are disclosed to consumers at the point of interaction where they are most relevant, not only in onboarding disclosures.
- Where a conflict of interest cannot be eliminated, the product defaults to the option that favors the consumer’s financial interests over the entity’s commercial interests.
- The entity does not accept compensation, fee-sharing arrangements, or other incentives from third parties that would cause the product to favor those parties’ products or services over equally suitable alternatives.
Non-Exploitation of Consumer Data
- Information shared by the consumer in the course of using the product is used to serve the consumer, not to extract value from the consumer.
- Financial data, interaction history, expressed goals, and stated vulnerabilities shared by the consumer are used only to improve the quality of service delivered to that consumer, absent explicit, separately obtained consent to other uses.
- The entity does not use inferences drawn from consumer data—including vulnerability signals, decision-making patterns, or financial stress indicators—to identify and exploit consumer susceptibilities.
- Consumer data is not used to train models that serve other commercial purposes without the consumer’s informed, specific, and separately obtained consent.