Bridging Innovation and Compliance in Finance with Confidential AI

In finance, AI is already reshaping how institutions detect fraud, model risk, serve customers, and uncover new revenue streams. However, as AI accelerates innovation, a stubborn barrier continues to stifle adoption: trust. 

Anyone who works in banking, insurance and FinTech knows that organizations in this industry all operate under some of the strictest data privacy and regulatory frameworks in the world. If they lose control of sensitive customer information, transaction data, or trading algorithms, they face the risk of serious fines, not to mention severe damage to customer trust.  

Still, there’s increasing pressure to create and deliver new services and real-time insights to remain competitive and provide customers with the best possible experience. Balancing that urgency with security often feels impossible, and the industry’s next step forward depends on removing that trade-off. 

That’s where Confidential AI comes in. 

Protecting the Future of FinTech with Agentic AI and Confidential Trust 

Finance is starting to embrace intelligence driven by agentic AI, which not only predicts outcomes but can autonomously take action and make decisions. For example, a bank could deploy agents that identify suspicious transactions as soon as they occur and then automate compliance with workflows and customer outreach. 

While this will create next-level efficiency, it’s also likely to create more risk because every model, data pipeline and API is a potential exposure point. Without tight and consistent verification and controls in place, the same tech that creates new levels of agility could also introduce dangerous vulnerabilities. 

That’s exactly the challenge the new Fortanix + NVIDIA Confidential AI platform is built to solve. 

Launched in October, the joint solution gives financial institutions a sovereign, on-premises foundation for Agentic AI, blending Fortanix Armet AI with NVIDIA Confidential Computing GPUs. The result is a platform that fosters innovation without compromising organizations' control over sensitive data or compliance obligations. 

Here’s how it works in practice: 

• End-to-end protection: Fortanix secures data and models across their lifecycles with NVIDIA Confidential Computing and composite attestation across CPUs and GPUs. 
• Verified trust: With Fortanix Data Security Manager (DSM), decryption keys, datasets, and model weights are only released after the system verifies that the environment is secure—a process known as attestation-gated key release. 
• Built-in compliance: Backed by a FIPS 140-2 Level 3-certified HSM, the platform enforces strict key custody, granular RBAC, and immutable audit logs, helping institutions simplify reporting and adhere to global regulations. 
• Faster time to market: Fortanix Armet AI enables organizations to deploy a Confidential AI pipeline in days, complete with built-in guardrails, observability and orchestration, rather than spending months stitching together disparate tools. 

For FinTechs and banks, all of this means AI can finally be used where it matters most: directly on sensitive financial data and within a cryptographically verified environment of trust. 

How Can Finance Leaders Securely Scale Agentic AI? 

The financial industry is one that has long embraced the concept of Zero Trust, because every transaction, user, and system interaction must be verified. Confidential AI takes that same philosophy and applies it to autonomous intelligence. 

With composite attestation and Confidential Computing, financial leaders can now prove that every AI process operates on genuine, uncompromised hardware. It’s trust you can measure, not just assume. This could apply to modeling market risk, managing liquidity, running anti-money laundering algorithms, and more. 

That verification unlocks new possibilities, such as: 

Fraud Detection and Real-Time Monitoring 

AI agents can inspect and correlate transaction data without exposing personally identifiable information (PII). Sensitive inputs remain encrypted while in use, ensuring compliance with PCI-DSS, GDPR and other AI governance frameworks. 

Trading and Quantitative Research 

Trading models and proprietary algorithms can run within secure enclaves, maintaining sub-millisecond performance on NVIDIA Hopper and Blackwell GPUs while protecting intellectual property from being compromised. 

Credit Scoring and Customer Personalization 

Confidential AI allows teams to train and refine models using data from across the business, including loans, deposits and credit/debit cards, while guaranteeing that customer data never leaves the verified environment. 

Audit-Ready Governance 

Immutable logs and verifiable attestations simplify compliance by providing regulators with clear evidence that sensitive data and model decisions were consistently handled within trusted, policy-enforced systems. 

All of this leads to responsible innovation where AI advances rapidly but remains grounded in verifiable security and compliance. 

What Confidential AI Means for Financial Leaders 

Combining Fortanix’s heritage in Confidential Computing and data protection with NVIDIA’s breakthrough GPU architectures is a boon for financial institutions, finally giving them a way to innovate securely at enterprise scale. 

For CISOs and compliance teams, it removes visibility gaps and reduces audit fatigue. For CTOs and data scientists, it means they can experiment and deploy with freedom from a trusted framework. And for executives, it ensures AI growth goals are met with the governance and accountability that regulators expect. 

It’s a best-of-both-worlds situation that combines the agility and productivity of modern AI with the assurance of security that’s provable. 

With Fortanix Armet AI and NVIDIA Confidential Computing, financial organizations close that gap. They can move confidently from pilot to production, protect sensitive data and models, and demonstrate compliance without slowing innovation. 

Fortanix and NVIDIA are building a future where every AI decision is intelligent and trustworthy. Request a demo or speak with our experts to see how your organization can bridge innovation and compliance while unlocking AI’s full potential with Confidential Trust.