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Financial Services — Audit-Defensible Records for AI Agents

AI agents in financial services increasingly take or inform actions that become regulated records: order submission and routing, the rationale behind a trade, suitability assessments, and customer communications. When an examiner later asks a firm to produce and authenticate those records, ordinary application logs and observability traces fall short — they are mutable and self-attested. Aevum produces the evidence layer that this setting actually requires.

This page is not legal advice. Whether and how SEC Rule 17a-4, FINRA Rule 4511, or any other obligation applies to your systems is a determination for your compliance and legal counsel. Aevum provides a technical control; it does not make a firm compliant on its own.

The recordkeeping standard

SEC Rule 17a-4 governs how broker-dealers preserve electronic records. Since the 2022 amendments (compliance date May 2023), firms may preserve records using either:

  • a write-once, read-many (WORM) system, or
  • an audit-trail alternative — a system that maintains a complete, time-stamped audit trail that permits the recreation of an original record if it is later altered or deleted, with the authenticity and accuracy of the records verifiable.

FINRA Rule 4511 incorporates these recordkeeping and retention obligations for FINRA members. Note that AI-generated content can itself become a record when it is communicated (for example, an agent-drafted client message).

How Aevum maps to the audit-trail alternative

What the audit-trail alternative expects Aevum mechanism
Recreate an original record after it is altered or deleted Append-only sigchain — every entry is chained to its predecessor; nothing is overwritten in place, so prior states are reconstructable
Verifiable authenticity Each entry is Ed25519-signed; any party can verify the signature with the public key alone
Verifiable accuracy / integrity SHA3-256 hash chain — altering any past entry breaks the chain and fails verification
Time-stamped audit trail Each receipt carries an RFC 3161 trusted timestamp; receipts can be anchored to a public transparency log (Rekor v2)
Independent / examiner access Receipts are portable (COSE_Sign1) and verifiable by a third party with no access to the firm's systems

What Aevum is — and is not — here

  • Is: the cryptographic evidence layer that makes an AI agent's actions tamper-evident, independently verifiable, and reconstructable after the fact.
  • Is not: a designated-third-party (D3P) service, a WORM storage product, or a substitute for your retention infrastructure and recordkeeping policies. Aevum produces the verifiable records; where and how you retain them, and your D3P/notification arrangements, remain yours.

Example

A worked code example (classification levels, a signed trading.order.submitted event, and a human-review gate for large trades) is in the Finance domain example.

Next steps