Your Financial Agent Needs to Show Its Work - Anirudh Veeraragavan, Fieldguide

Anirudh Veeraragavan, lead security engineer at Fieldguide, argues that in finance an agent getting the right answer isn't enough; you have to be able to show how it got there. Building an agent for a bank reconciliation audit, he walks through four controls that make its decisions defensible: authorization that stops an agent from overwriting work a human already reviewed, execution records that let you replay and compare individual steps, citations tied to an exact document version, and auditing your eval data so a 97% score doesn't hide real failures. He also covers when the agent should stop and hand the decision to a person, and how the same pattern applies to credit and anti-money-laundering. Chapters: 0:00 Intro 0:40 Building a financial audit agent 1:56 When someone asks why 2:18 Why it matters: the Peregrine fraud 3:05 Can an auditor follow the agent? 4:00 Example: a bank reconciliation 4:27 Control 1: Authorization 5:37 Control 2: Execution control 7:33 Control 3: Evidence provenance 8:44 Control 4: Evaluation integrity 10:09 When the agent should stop and ask 11:23 You need all four 12:16 Beyond audit: credit and AML Anirudh Veeraragavan https://www.fieldguide.io Join us in SF for the second annual AIE CODE summit: https://aie.codes our last flagship summit of 2026. Applications live now!