Safety is essential to financial services and consumer confidence in safety is believed to drive the relatively high trust enjoyed by the finance domain. Artificial Intelligence is increasingly leveraged by financial services. This increased use of AI, coupled with the safety and trust challenges in domains with more sustained use of AI, argues for the criticality of understanding safety in the context of AI and finance.

Some areas of AI safety research cut across domains but the finance domain adds to the research challenges due to the critical role financial services play in society and variance in end user financial expertise and tool access. In addition, new financial instruments whose complex underlying technology is difficult to understand and may have unexpected privacy/security consequences, lead to novel research challenges. Blockchain-based payments are an important example. They, particularly when paired with AI, offer the democratization of many transactions through decentralization, but are currently hard to undo and are a potential scammer tool.

This workshop will delve into many of these challenges and help inform a research roadmap in this area. The agenda will consist of invited talks with ample discussion time, all of which will be summarized in a short white paper following the conclusion of the workshop.