Ensuring the trustworthiness of artificial intelligence (AI) systems is critical as they become increasingly integrated into domains like healthcare, finance, and public administration. This paper explores frameworks and metrics for evaluating AI trustworthiness, focusing on key principles such as fairness, transparency, privacy, and security. This study is guided by two central questions: how can trust in AI systems be systematically measured across the AI lifecycle, and what are the trade-offs involved when optimizing for different trustworthiness dimensions? By examining frameworks such as the NIST AI Risk Management Framework (AI RMF), the AI Trust Framework and Maturity Model (AI-TMM), and ISO/IEC standards, this study bridges theoretical insights with practical applications. We identify major risks across the AI lifecycle stages and outline various metrics to address challenges in system reliability, bias mitigation, and model explainability. This study includes a comparative analysis of existing standards and their application across industries to illustrate their effectiveness. Real-world case studies, including applications in healthcare, financial services, and autonomous systems, demonstrate approaches to applying trust metrics. The findings reveal that achieving trustworthiness involves navigating trade-offs between competing metrics, such as fairness versus efficiency or privacy versus transparency, and emphasizes the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration for robust AI governance. Emerging trends suggest the need for adaptive frameworks for AI trustworthiness that evolve alongside advancements in AI technologies. This paper contributes to the field by proposing a comprehensive review of existing frameworks with guidelines for building resilient, ethical, and transparent AI systems, ensuring their alignment with regulatory requirements and societal expectations.

Rapid technological developments in the last decade have contributed to using machine learning (ML) in various economic sectors. Financial institutions have embraced technology and have applied ML algorithms in trading, portfolio management, and investment advising. Large-scale automation capabilities and cost savings make the ML algorithms attractive for personal and corporate finance applications. Using ML applications in finance raises ethical issues that need to be carefully examined. We engage a group of experts in finance and ethics to evaluate the relationship between ethical principles of finance and ML. The paper compares the experts’ findings with the results obtained using natural language processing (NLP) transformer models, given their ability to capture the semantic text similarity. The results reveal that the finance principles of integrity and fairness have the most significant relationships with ML ethics. The study includes a use case with SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) and Microsoft Responsible AI Widgets explainability tools for error analysis and visualization of ML models. It analyzes credit card approval data and demonstrate that the explainability tools can address ethical issues in fintech, and improve transparency, thereby increasing the overall trustworthiness of ML models. The results show that both humans and machines could err in approving credit card requests despite using their best judgment based on the available information. Hence, human-machine collaboration could contribute to improved decision-making in finance. We propose a conceptual framework for addressing ethical challenges in fintech such as bias, discrimination, differential pricing, conflict of interest, and data protection.

Lexicon-based sentiment analysis in finance leverages specialized, manually annotated lexicons created by human experts to extract sentiment from financial texts effectively. Although lexicon-based methods are simple to implement and fast to operate on textual data, they require considerable manual annotation efforts to create, maintain, and update the lexicons. These methods are also considered inferior to the deep learning-based approaches, such as transformer models, which have become dominant in various natural language processing (NLP) tasks due to their remarkable performance. However, their efficacy comes at a cost: these models require extensive data and computational resources for both training and testing. Additionally, they involve significant prediction times, making them unsuitable for real-time production environments or systems with limited processing capabilities. In this paper, we introduce a novel methodology named eXplainable Lexicons (XLex) that combines the advantages of both lexicon-based methods and transformer models. We propose an approach that utilizes transformers and SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) for explainability to automatically learn financial lexicons. Our study presents four main contributions. Firstly, we demonstrate that transformer-aided explainable lexicons can enhance the vocabulary coverage of the benchmark Loughran-McDonald (LM) lexicon. This enhancement leads to a significant reduction in the need for human involvement in the process of annotating, maintaining, and updating the lexicons. Secondly, we show that the resulting lexicon outperforms the standard LM lexicon in sentiment analysis of financial datasets. Our experiments show that XLex outperforms LM when applied to general financial texts, resulting in enhanced word coverage and an overall increase in classification accuracy by 0.431. Furthermore, by employing XLex to extend LM, we create a combined dictionary, XLex+LM, which achieves an even higher accuracy improvement of 0.450. Thirdly, we illustrate that the lexicon-based approach is significantly more efficient in terms of model speed and size compared to transformers. Lastly, the proposed XLex approach is inherently more interpretable than transformer models. This interpretability is advantageous as lexicon models rely on predefined rules, unlike transformers, which have complex inner workings. The interpretability of the models allows for better understanding and insights into the results of sentiment analysis, making the XLex approach a valuable tool for financial decision-making.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping financial systems and services, as intelligent AI agents increasingly form the foundation of autonomous, goal-driven systems capable of reasoning, learning, and action. This review synthesizes recent research and developments in the application of AI agents across core financial domains. Specifically, it covers the deployment of agent-based AI in algorithmic trading, fraud detection, credit risk assessment, robo-advisory, and regulatory compliance (RegTech). The review focuses on advanced agent-based methodologies, including reinforcement learning, multi-agent systems, and autonomous decision-making frameworks, particularly those leveraging large language models (LLMs), contrasting these with traditional AI or purely statistical models. Our primary goals are to consolidate current knowledge, identify significant trends and architectural approaches, review the practical efficiency and impact of current applications, and delineate key challenges and promising future research directions. The increasing sophistication of AI agents offers unprecedented opportunities for innovation in finance, yet presents complex technical, ethical, and regulatory challenges that demand careful consideration and proactive strategies. This review aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of this rapidly evolving landscape, highlighting the role of agent-based AI in the ongoing transformation of the financial industry, and is intended to serve financial institutions, regulators, investors, analysts, researchers, and other key stakeholders in the financial ecosystem.

The task of company classification is traditionally performed using established standards, such as the Global Industry Classification Standard (GICS). However, these approaches heavily rely on laborious manual efforts by domain experts, resulting in slow, costly, and vendor-specific assignments. Therefore, we investigate recent natural language processing (NLP) advancements to automate the company classification process. In particular, we employ and evaluate various NLP-based models, including zero-shot learning, One-vs-Rest classification, multi-class classifiers, and ChatGPT-aided classification. We conduct a comprehensive comparison among these models to assess their effectiveness in the company classification task. The evaluation uses the Wharton Research Data Services (WRDS) dataset, consisting of textual descriptions of publicly traded companies. Our findings reveal that the RoBERTa and One-vs-Rest classifiers surpass the other methods, achieving F1 scores of 0.81 and 0.80 on the WRDS dataset, respectively. These results demonstrate that deep learning algorithms offer the potential to automate, standardize, and continuously update classification systems in an efficient and cost-effective way. In addition, we introduce several improvements to the multi-class classification techniques: (1) in the zero-shot methodology, we use TF-IDF to enhance sector representation, yielding improved accuracy in comparison to standard zero-shot classifiers; (2) next, we use ChatGPT for dataset generation, revealing potential in scenarios where datasets of company descriptions are lacking; and (3) we also employ K-Fold to reduce noise in the WRDS dataset, followed by conducting experiments to assess the impact of noise reduction on the company classification results.

Interoperability is one of the biggest challenges facing the Internet of Things (IoT). While the emergence of many IoT protocols promises Internet connectivity to a large number of devices, it also leads to an inevitable fragmentation that hinders the IoT adoption. The existing literature focuses on creating device abstractions to deal with the multiplicity of protocols, but little work has been done to eliminate the root cause of fragmentation - the number of protocols itself. This paper proposes a novel approach to simplify IoT by design based on the Recursive InterNetwork Architecture (RINA) and explores RINA's benefits such as reducing protocol complexity, improving standardization, and enhancing security.