Jon Waldman
President and Co-Founder
Questions about AI governance often begin with policies, ownership, and oversight. SBS CyberSecurity President and Co-Founder Jon Waldman believes they should begin somewhere else.
Waldman recently joined the American Bankers Association Podcast to discuss how financial institutions can approach AI governance while continuing to innovate. The conversation explored practical steps banks can take to govern AI, beginning with what Waldman sees as one of the industry's biggest challenges: visibility.
AI can appear across vendor products, fraud platforms, cybersecurity tools, productivity suites, and employee-adopted technologies, often referred to as shadow AI.
"It's kind of hard to create a policy if you don't even know where AI exists in the first place, which makes it hard to assess the risk," he said.
Visibility into where AI is being used becomes the foundation for everything that follows: assessing risk, establishing appropriate controls, and building an effective governance program.
Waldman also emphasized that AI governance requires both accountability and collaboration. While a designated owner should be accountable for outcomes, governance should not be isolated within a single department. Technology, risk, compliance, security, operations, and executive leadership all have a role to play in evaluating AI use cases and monitoring results.
When asked about balancing innovation with regulatory expectations, Waldman challenged the idea that institutions must choose between the two.
"If you're good at risk management, then you're going to be better at innovation, because you are at least managing that innovation responsibly."
Drawing on lessons from the early days of online banking, he explained that financial institutions have successfully adopted new technologies before by identifying risks, implementing controls, and making informed decisions rather than avoiding innovation altogether. AI may be a new technology, but the risk management discipline needed to adopt it responsibly is not.
For financial institutions working through these same questions, SBS CyberSecurity's Virtual Chief AI Officer (vCAIO) service provides support for building AI governance frameworks, assessing AI risk, and developing a responsible approach to adoption.
Listen to the full conversation on the ABA podcast.