A Guardrail Framework for Sensitive Financial Information Protection: A Taxonomy-Driven Approach

Abstract

The increasing adoption of large language models in the fi-nancial sector introduces significant challenges related to the handling of sensitive financial information (SFI). Existing general-purpose content safety solutions, or guardrails, often fall short in detecting domain-specific risks inherent in finan-cial data processing. This study addresses these gaps by de-veloping a comprehensive taxonomy of SFI, grounded in globally recognized financial, information security, and AI governance standards. Leveraging this taxonomy, we synthe-sized an extensive dataset encompassing diverse categories of SFI and trained GARD (Generative Adversarial network Risk Detection) model to detect sensitive content in both in-puts and outputs of GenAI systems within the financial do-main. Our evaluation compared GARD against commercial guardrail solutions, including the OpenAI Moderation API and Microsoft Azure Content Safety (ACS). The results demonstrated that while commercial solutions maintained high precision, their recall was substantially lower, indicating many risky instances went undetected. In contrast, our model achieved a recall score of 0.98, significantly outperforming the benchmarks and enhancing SFI detection. These findings underscore the necessity of domain-specific guardrails tai-lored to the financial sector to ensure robust AI safety and compliance. In conclusion, this work contributes (1) A de-tailed taxonomy of SFI tailored for GenAI applications, (2) A comprehensive synthetic dataset that encompasses a wide range of sensitive topics relevant to the domain and (3) A high-performance risk detection model that can be deployed independently or alongside existing solutions to improve con-tent safety in financial services. This approach promotes trust, mitigates financial, legal, and reputational risks, and supports the responsible adoption of GenAI technologies in sensitive domains.