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Policy-as-code engines evaluate decisions consistently. They do not preserve them. The case for capturing each decision at execution rather than asking the engine to reconstruct it later.
By Sam Carter
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Logs tell you what happened. They cannot prove why. The case for treating decisions themselves as the artefact — captured at execution rather than reconstructed later from fragments.
Tier-one banks do not lack AI policy. They lack the ability to prove a single decision when an FCA letter arrives eight months later. Governance is tested one decision at a time.
AI explainability tools — SHAP, feature importance, local explanations — describe how a model behaved. They do not prove the decision was right at the time.
A core banking platform reconstructs decisions after the fact. Here is what one looks like when the reconstruction is not needed — captured at execution as a single, signed artefact.