Can your financial institution demonstrate confidence in its decisions?

Every bank, capital-markets firm, insurer, and reinsurer makes high-stakes decisions every day. Whether related to sanctions screening, tax positions, claims and coverage determinations, contract interpretation, litigation strategy, or regulatory reporting, those decisions must withstand scrutiny.

None of the decisions happen in isolation, and none of them get a pass just because they were made quickly.

What matters most is whether you can answer a regulator, auditor, examiner, or board members’ question about what that decision was based on and show your work. For an insurer, that scrutiny is often direct and periodic. A conduct examination reads the claim file itself, asking what was decided, when, on what basis, and whether the stated procedure was followed. The consequences of not being able to do so are critical, and that’s why legal, tax, compliance, and risk teams need to ensure their decisions are defensible.

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Why trust matters more than speed

Questions leaders should be able to answer with confidence

How Fiduciary-Grade AI™ enables confident decisions

Confidence is a capability, not a claim

Why trust matters more than speed

Most institutions can move fast when they need to. What’s harder to demonstrate is that the information behind a fast decision was complete, current, and defensible before anyone acted on it.

According to the Thomson Reuters 2026 Corporate Tax Department Technology Report, 64% of surveyed tax departments describe themselves as operating in chaotic or reactive modes, while only 5% call themselves optimized. That research spans industries rather than singling out financial services, but the pattern is one every regulated institution recognizes. Fragmented workflows are the norm, not the exception.

The same discrepancy shows how professionals feel about the AI tools built to help them. The Thomson Reuters Institute Future of Professionals Report 2026 found that professionals are clear about what they need from AI at work:

• 96% want their confidential data safeguarded
• 94% want outputs grounded in authoritative content
• 90% want reasoning they can explain and defend

However, 41% of professionals who already use AI at work say they don’t have access to tools built to that standard. For institutions where every decision must withstand regulatory scrutiny, that can mean the difference between a decision your team can stand behind and one you’re hoping nobody asks about too closely.

For insurers, the same standards show up when an examiner reviews a claim or underwriting file. The examiner asks what information the team relied on, whether it was authoritative, and whether the team can explain the reasoning.

Questions leaders should be able to answer with confidence

Boards and accountable executives are increasingly expected to demonstrate timely stewardship and a clear culture of compliance, rather than to describe it after the fact. A useful test is whether your institution can answer these questions with confidence, right now, not after a fire drill:

• Which banking and insurance entities, products, and jurisdictions are affected by a new rule or third-party event?
• Can the institution show that a rule change reached the manuals, templates, and procedures that depend on it, and that it took effect?
• Can tax trace the transaction and contract evidence behind an indirect tax position?
• Can legal access the relevant regulatory, contractual, and entity context without requesting information from several systems?
• Can claims, financial crime, and risk teams see a consistent and complete view of customer, claimant, counterparty, and transaction data, including visibility into potential gaps or inconsistencies across systems?
• Can the institution show what an AI-assisted output was based on, what changed, and who approved it?

If even one of those is difficult to answer, that’s not an issue with technology alone. It’s more of an issue with visibility, and it can show up at the worst possible time.

How Fiduciary-Grade AI™ enables confident decisions

Fiduciary-Grade AI is the Thomson Reuters standard for AI used across our products in high-stakes professional work. For financial institutions and insurers, it means AI grounded in authoritative, domain-specific content and relevant institutional data, protected by rigorous privacy and security safeguards, and built to produce transparent, verifiable outputs with appropriate professional oversight.

Fiduciary-Grade AI is often discussed in terms of what it enables. It’s worth being precise about what that standard does and doesn’t do. Fiduciary-Grade AI doesn’t remove independent controls or merge distinct regulatory processes, and it doesn’t make the decision for you. What it does is help your legal, tax, compliance, and risk teams draw on governed legal, tax, invoicing, identity, and entity intelligence, so the work behind a decision can be examined, explained, and defended when someone asks.

That distinction matters more as AI takes on more of the groundwork behind legal analysis, tax treatment, financial crime review, regulatory reporting, underwriting, and claims decisions.

Confidence is a capability, not a claim

You can’t remove regulatory, tax, and operational complexity from financial services and insurance, and no institution should pretend otherwise. What you can change is how your teams respond to it. It should be a response with authoritative information, governed workflows, and a clear line of accountability for every decision that gets made.

That’s the difference between responding to complexity and maintaining control of it.

Learn how Fiduciary-Grade AI helps your team answer an examiner’s questions with decisions they can explain and defend.