Paper 04 · The gap is named
AI Optimizes. The Bank Pays the Price. Decision Integrity in Agentic Retail Banking
The paper in which the Fiduciary Gap™ is named and defined, and Decision Engineering™ is named as the discipline.
What this paper argues
Retail banking has been at the forefront of AI adoption. Optimisation systems now hold real executional authority over pricing, retention and deposit behaviour — authority granted faster than the institution's obligations were encoded into them.
This paper names and defines the Fiduciary Gap™: the mismatch between what the AI system is optimised to do and the broader responsibilities of the institution towards customers and balance sheet. It also names the discipline — governance that is no longer concerned with validating models, but with engineering decision authority.
The deposit-optimisation case at the centre of the paper shows the pattern in full: a win on the dashboard, a loss on the balance sheet.
Terms used here are defined once in the glossary: The Fiduciary Gap™ · Decision Engineering™
Start with one decision
Name an important decision made in the last ninety days that your institution could not fully replay today — the rule that applied, the data that was live, the authority that permitted it.