The FSI Semantic Working Group Is Live¶
AI agents are producing real business outcomes in financial services. The firms moving fastest have one thing in common: they solved the semantic layer first.
The evidence is no longer hypothetical. Across financial services, firms are moving agentic AI from experimentation into real business workflows: compressing institutional processes from days to minutes, and improving the quality and speed of decision-making.
The firms at the front of this wave are not simply waiting for better models or faster compute. They are moving faster because they solved something harder first: they established a consistent, trusted semantic layer that gives their data meaning before an agent ever touches it.
The firms that have not solved this yet are running into a familiar barrier. Many organizations still struggle to establish a semantic layer that gives data consistent business meaning and context. Without that foundation, agents cannot operate with a reliable understanding of the business. The quality of their outputs — and the decisions made from them — is at risk.
This is not only a technology problem. It is a coordination problem. And it is one that no single institution can solve alone.
Why This Requires a Collective Response¶
In financial services, every institution independently models many of the same core concepts: trades, positions, instruments, claims, accounts, entities, transactions, and exposures. But there is no shared vocabulary to anchor those concepts across firms.
Structural standards give the industry wire formats. They help systems exchange data. But they do not, on their own, give the industry a shared language for what that data means.
The cost is measurable: inefficient integrations, inconsistent AI outputs, duplicated modeling work, and time-to-value that stretches far beyond what the technology itself should require. As AI agents move from experimentation into production — acting autonomously, at scale, and across firm boundaries — unresolved semantic misalignment stops being a data quality issue and becomes a business risk.
This is the problem the Financial Services Semantic Working Group was formed to address.
The Working Group¶
On Wednesday, June 3, 2026, the Financial Services Semantic Working Group held its first formal meeting under the Open Semantic Interchange (OSI) umbrella.
This is an industry initiative — convened by practitioners, for practitioners — with representation from across the full breadth of financial services.
Current participants include Northern Trust, DTCC, Cotality, LSEG, Verisk, BlackRock, S\&P Global, AIG, Equilar, TIAA, among others.
Banking. Insurance. Asset management. Wealth management. Market infrastructure. Data providers.
Major sub-verticals across financial services are represented because semantic alignment that works in only one corner of the industry is not true alignment. It is only a slightly larger silo.
What We Agreed On¶
The first meeting was not about shipping deliverables. It was about agreeing on the problem, the principles, and the shape of the work ahead.
The group ratified a formal problem statement:
"The structural standard gives us a wire format; it does not give us a shared language. In financial services, data providers and institutions independently model the same core concepts — with no shared vocabulary to anchor them."
The group also discussed logistical, procedural, and technical topics. Rather than immediately deciding deeper architectural questions, members agreed to form initiatives that will investigate priority topics between meetings and bring findings back to the full working group.
Three initiatives were agreed upon:
Architecture¶
This initiative will propose a starting architecture for the working group. The proposal will include an initial set of functions and objects, represented in Mermaid and accompanied by a Markdown description of assumptions, design choices, and outstanding questions. The architecture proposal will be shared through the OSI GitHub.
Measurement of Commercial Impact¶
The working group agreed that adoption and impact must be measurable. Semantic misalignment creates significant commercial costs, including integration spend, duplicated effort, and delayed time-to-value. This initiative will propose specific methods for measuring adoption of the OSI standard and demonstrating its commercial impact over time.
Structure¶
Financial services is not a monolith. It is made up of several sub-industries, each with its own business concepts, operating models, and departmental structures. Those differences have direct implications for how shared semantics should be organized. This initiative will recommend how the working group should structure financial services semantics across sub-industries and functional domains.
A full meeting minutes document is forthcoming.
What Comes Next¶
The working group now moves into parallel workstreams for each of these initiatives.
While the first meeting focused on alignment, logistics, and initial operating structure, the next phase is where the deeper work begins. Each initiative will develop recommendations for review and discussion at a future working group meeting.
This is early. There is significant work ahead. We are glad to be doing it together.