Getting an AI system approved in financial services comes down to three questions. They are asked every time, and they are not negotiable.
The questions sit underneath SR 11-7, the supervisory guidance that has governed model risk in banking. They are the same questions every business should answer before it deploys AI.
Who owns this?
One person, named, and reachable at 2am when the output is wrong and someone important has noticed.
"The whole team is responsible" means nobody is responsible.
What does failure actually look like?
Not "it might give wrong answers." Specifically: what breaks, and who is harmed?
Model reviews stop when the honest answer is that the team has not thought about it. A system without that answer does not ship.
Who is checking next month?
AI systems drift. A model that worked in January can degrade quietly by March because the data changed, the base model was updated, or the world shifted.
Software that makes decisions on someone's behalf needs scheduled monitoring, with an owner and a review date.
Regulation required the answers. Every industry can adopt them.
These questions come from banking regulation, but they apply to any software that makes decisions on someone's behalf. Mission-critical teams adopted them because the cost of skipping them shows up immediately.
Financial services was required to answer them first. Every other industry can adopt them by choice, and the firms that do will make fewer costly mistakes than the ones that do not.
An interactive self-assessment built on these three questions, "3 Questions Before You Deploy," is on the author's site: swapniltamse.com/tool/deploy-risk-assessment.