Washington, DC – Consumer Reports today published the Consumer Finance AI Standard, a first-of-its-kind framework defining the rights, protections, and design practices consumers are owed by AI-powered financial products. AI increasingly makes decisions over who receives credit, which insurance claims are approved, and how people’s money is managed – and it is starting to act on consumers’ behalf, not just advise them.
The Standard sets a clear bar against manipulation, black-box decisions, and the conflicts of interest that surface when a product serves the company instead of the customer.
Financial services is where these stakes are highest and most immediate. But the questions the Standard answers: Can you trust what it tells you? Is it working for you, or for the company? Can you stay in control when it acts on your behalf? These are the same questions consumers will face as AI moves into every part of their lives.
“AI is making consequential decisions about consumers’ financial lives with a lack of accountability and transparency. We developed this standard as a way to bridge that divide so that consumers feel more secure when using AI-powered financial products,” said Delicia Hand, senior director of the digital marketplace for Consumer Reports. “While existing consumer protection laws apply to AI, there hasn’t been a clear framework defining what consumers should specifically expect from AI-powered financial products. Built on years of fintech product evaluations and a rigorous multi-stakeholder process, this standard was designed to fill the consumer protection gap, bringing much-needed guidance to industry and regulators on best practices in the emerging AI-driven financial ecosystem.”
The Consumer Finance Artificial Intelligence Standard was developed through a rigorous, multi-year process rooted in CR’s extensive testing of peer-to-peer (P2P) payments, banking apps, crypto exchanges, and investment platforms. This real-world evaluation data directly informed the core criteria of the standard. To ensure the framework was both robust and compliant, a comprehensive review was conducted on existing regulatory guidelines—including the NIST Risk Management Framework, FCA regulations, CFPB guidance, and the EU AI Act—alongside more than 20 academic and regulatory sources. Furthermore, the standard was refined through a multi-stakeholder process, which included interviews and roundtables featuring academics, current and former regulators, nonprofits, and representatives from both fintech and traditional financial institutions.
The Consumer Finance AI Standard is the first independent consumer-centered AI standard for financial services – built not around what’s technically possible or legally required, but around a single question consumers can hold any product to: Is this actually working for me?
It’s nine principles included below; break each question down into concrete expectations.
- Security & Trust: AI financial products must minimize risk, and protect consumers from misuse, data breaches, and unauthorized financial harms.
- Privacy & Data Minimization: Consumer data is collected, used, and shared responsibly and proportionately, only to the extent necessary for service delivery and compliance requirements (as opposed to generalized commercial purposes), and consumers retain meaningful and frictionless control over how their data is handled.
- Transparency & Accountability: Entities that offer AI financial products and services communicate with users in a complete and meaningful way.
- Honesty & Non-Manipulation: AI financial products must be honest with consumers, producing outputs that are accurate, calibrated, and independent of the consumer’s apparent preferences or the entity’s commercial interests. This principle addresses both technical accuracy and the obligation of the product to function as a trustworthy source of information, where sycophancy is treated here as an honesty failure rather than technical reliability issue.
- Reliability & Operational Integrity: AI financial products or services produce consistent, accurate, and predictable outputs across varied inputs and conditions.
- Consumer Agency & Control: AI financial products must support meaningful consumer agency, ensuring users can understand, question, and influence decisions that affect them. This includes the right to understand, oversee, and override actions taken autonomously on their behalf by AI systems.
- Duty of Loyalty: 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.
- Fairness & Nondiscrimination: AI financial products must not produce discriminatory outcomes, directly or indirectly, across protected characteristics or proxy variables.
- Duty of Vigor: AI financial products don’t just avoid harm – they actively advance the consumer’s interest, surfacing the rights and options available to someone in their situation so they don’t have to know the law themselves.
The Standard is funded in part by the generosity of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and builds on CR’s track record of developing standards and advising industry and regulators on consumer protection, including the 2018 Digital Standard, and 2025 Fairness by Design Playbook which gave product, compliance, and risk teams actionable guidance for building fairer financial products. It also reflects a longer arc: for nearly 90 years, CR has worked to keep the marketplace fair as it changes. As AI becomes the infrastructure of everyday economic life, defining what people should be able to expect from it – starting where the stakes are highest, their financial lives – is the next chapter of that work.
The full Consumer Finance AI Standard, including the criteria and evaluation procedures behind each of the nine principles, is available here. CR invites financial institutions, fintechs, regulators, and consumer advocates to engage with the Standard and put it to work – testing it against real products and helping refine it as AI in financial services evolves.
Contact: cyrus.rassool@consumer.org