Context Is Not Authority: Structured Runtime Governance for Financial Market Agents

2026-08-09

AI Summary

This work addresses the critical issue of financial agents performing unauthorized operations—such as improper commitments or trades—due to misinterpretation of contextual information. To mitigate this, we propose SAGE-Fin, a permission-delegation contract framework tailored for financial domains that uniquely treats the operational effect itself as a runtime governance target. By integrating typed proposal compilation, state-aware permission contraction, and precise receipt verification, SAGE-Fin dynamically enforces alignment between executed actions and the current market, account, strategy, and conversational states. The system further incorporates debt-record coverage, artifact-receipt matching, and permission revalidation mechanisms to prevent contextual data from being erroneously treated as authorization grounds. Evaluated on 616 test cases, SAGE-Fin achieves 100% reference consistency, has received strong endorsement from operational teams in real-world deployment, and successfully reproduces and intercepts three historical failure modes.

Abstract

Financial agents can turn correct context into an unauthorized effect: a customer-facing commitment, trade, or deployed policy. We present SAGE-Fin, a finance-specific authority-handoff contract that makes the proposed effect, not merely its text, the object of runtime control. SAGE-Fin compiles proposals into typed, adapter-bound candidates; records missing or stale institutional obligations as coverage debt; contracts authority under current market, account, policy, and dialogue state; and requires an exact-artifact receipt whose nominal type matches the consuming response, execution, or policy adapter. Evidence and workflow progress cannot substitute for effect authority, and prior authorization is rechecked after state changes. Across an authored 616-case catalog, five deterministic specifications yield 3,080 outputs; a label-isolated harness obtains 616/616 binary reference-prototype parity, including 3/3 named response-gate fixtures, while 22 tests cover selected paths. These results establish executable conformance, not independent safety accuracy. Separately, SAGE-Fin's response gate processed real customer-facing production requests at a confidential digital-asset platform. An operational team independent of the implementation team reached a strongly positive post-deployment conclusion on practical usefulness and workflow fit, and end-user feedback was also strongly positive. Disclosure permits only the review's independence, stakeholder classes, assessed dimensions, and directional conclusion, so this is qualitative field corroboration rather than an aggregate effect estimate. Three distinct de-identified predecessor failures, with independently confirmed 0/3 interception, ground repeated-emission drift, stale account evidence, and missing escalation state without estimating prevalence or treatment effect.

Problem

• financial agents
• unauthorized effect
• runtime governance
• authority-handoff
• context misuse

Innovation

• runtime governance
• authority-handoff contract
• typed effect control
• coverage debt
• exact-artifact receipt