Paul Merrison — AI governance for financial services

The regulations already exist. The engineering controls that make them work on GenAI don’t.

I work on the gap the April 2026 SR 11-7 rewrite just made explicit — the one between Model Risk Management doctrine and the actual mechanics of generative and agentic AI: prompts, vector indexes, tool-use loops, and a vendor’s silent weekly model update. Most firms are still trying to bridge it with policy documents alone.

Head of Infosec & AI Governance at Tetrate, and a contributor to the FINOS AI Governance Framework (Newcomer Award, OSFF NYC 2025). I write about AI governance as the work regulated firms have to evidence — not as framework adoption — and take a small number of fractional advisory engagements each year with banks, insurers, and FS infrastructure firms.

Currently taking a small number of fractional engagements through 2026.

paul@paulmerrison.io · LinkedIn · Background

Recent

  1. Essay

    SR 11-7 Just Wrote Itself Out of the GenAI Conversation

    The April 17, 2026 interagency MRM rewrite formally excludes generative and agentic AI from scope. That's not a retreat — it's an RFI window.

  2. Article Tetrate Blog

    Agent Security: What NIST Wants You to Think About Before Your Agent Calls a Tool

    Your agent has AWS credentials. It can execute cloud CLI commands. NIST has opinions about this. Here's what tool-calling security looks like in practice.

  3. Article Tetrate Blog

    Making Agents Reliable: Auto-Save, Stable IDs, and the Context Window Problem

    When your agent crashes at tool call 142 out of 150, you'd better hope the first 141 findings aren't lost. Here are the patterns that made our cost agents production-ready.

  4. Article Tetrate Blog

    Not Everything Needs an LLM: When to Remove the AI from Your AI Agent

    We built an agent to sync compliance data. Then we built a version without the LLM that runs faster, costs less, and produces identical results. Knowing when to remove the AI is an underrated skill.

  5. Article Tetrate Blog

    Two Ways to Build a Cost Agent (And Why We Use Both)

    We built two fundamentally different architectures for our cost optimization agents. One lets the LLM drive. The other relegates it to a single call. Both have their place.

  6. Article Tetrate Blog

    Your Agent Found 2.4 Percent of the Savings. Now What?

    We built a cost optimization agent. It worked. Then we did the math: it was catching 2.4 percent of the savings. Here's what was missing and what we changed.

  7. Article Tetrate Blog

    We Built an AI Agent to Cut Our Cloud Bill in Half

    Our cloud bill was attracting board-level attention. Instead of hiring a FinOps team, we built AI agents that scan AWS, GCP, and Azure weekly. Here's what we learned.

  8. Article Tetrate Blog

    FINRA Just Told You What They'll Examine Your AI Agents On

    FINRA's 2026 report has a new section on AI agents with seven named risks and four considerations for firms. Here's what that actually means for your engineering team.