Authors: Meng Chen (Bantang), Wen Jun (Siyue), Ling Lezhen (Lezhen), Xu Lei (Chongshu), Lin Yuan (Niren)
01 Product Positioning and Core Vision
1.1 What Is FinXScope
FinXScope is a financial-grade, AI-native agent foundation built on AgentScope Java by the Alibaba Cloud New Finance Technical Services team. As a core part of the overall Agent Harness system, FinXScope fully reuses AgentScope Java’s mature capabilities in agent orchestration, tool integration, multi-model access, and extensible runtime, and on top of that performs deep customization and enhancement to meet the financial industry’s compliance, security, and high-availability requirements. The complete Agent Harness system consists of the FinXScope runtime foundation, the AI Service Asset Platform, the full-link evaluation platform, and the operations management platform, with FinXScope taking on the most critical responsibility of agent execution and management.1.2 Customer Progress and Market Validation
Since its launch, FinXScope has attracted strong attention from multiple financial institutions and achieved substantive collaboration progress. It has gone into production with 10 leading financial customers, is being delivered to more than 20 additional customers, and covers a financial customer base of more than 60, spanning multiple financial business formats including state-owned major banks, joint-stock banks, insurance companies, and securities firms. The actual deployment scenarios cover core financial businesses such as wealth management, customer manager empowerment, intelligent underwriting, compliance review, and investment research analysis. Among the projects already in production, AI-native apps have reached user bases in the tens of millions, validating FinXScope’s stability and business value in real production environments. These practices validate one core judgment: what financial institutions need is not yet another chatbot framework, but a runtime foundation that can truly support enterprise-grade agents from proof of concept to production at scale.02 Industry Background and Challenges
2.1 The Paradigm Leap from “Feature Navigation” to “Conversation as Service”
Financial AI is undergoing a fundamental paradigm shift. Since 2024, autonomous agent products represented by Manus, Claude Code, and Hermes Agent have ignited global market attention, and OpenClaw gained over 230,000 GitHub Stars within 3 months, becoming a phenomenon-level project. These landmark events prove that large models have evolved from “chat assistants” into “working partners” capable of autonomously planning and executing complex tasks.2.2 Structural Challenges Financial Institutions Face When Building Agents
According to the analysis in Ernst & Young’s “AI Banking White Paper”, the scaled deployment of AI technology in banking already carries strategic urgency. PwC’s 2026 financial AI survey also points out that banks and insurers care most about traceability and explainability in AI governance. However, as financial institutions move from POC validation toward scaled production, they face a series of deep structural challenges — precisely the ones FinXScope is designed to address:03 The AI-Native Six-Layer Architecture
3.1 Six-Layer Architecture Design
FinXScope is the core engine of the entire Agent Harness system, and also the first enterprise-grade agent runtime foundation targeting the financial industry. It provides a systematic, complete capability combination rather than scattered technical components: based on the AgentScope framework — proven at large scale at Alibaba — it adds ten fully self-developed core capabilities and financial-grade enhancements, forming an agent runtime platform with both a solid technical foundation and rapid adaptability to financial scenarios. Around FinXScope, the Agent Harness system further extends into the AI Service Asset Platform (FinXSkillHub), the full-link evaluation platform (FinXVantage), and the operations management platform, together covering the complete lifecycle of agents from development and execution to continuous optimization. FinXScope’s six-layer architecture is not only the technical implementation skeleton of this system, but also a brand-new definition and specification of enterprise application architecture for the AI-native era.3.2 Detailed Architecture Design
3.3 Strategic Significance of the AI-Native Architecture
The significance of the six-layer architecture goes far beyond technical implementation. It answers a fundamental question financial institutions face in their intelligent transformation: when AI upgrades from “auxiliary tool” to “core driving force”, how should an enterprise’s technical architecture be reorganized?04 Deep Dive into Core Capabilities
The ten core capabilities below are FinXScope’s technical moat. They include both fully self-developed original capabilities and deep enhancements built on AgentScope. These capabilities originate from the rigid requirements of real financial customer scenarios and have been polished and validated in multiple production environments.4.1 Intent Engine: Precise Understanding of Financial Semantics
Scenario pain points: In financial conversation scenarios, users’ expressions are often colloquial, vague, and heavily context-dependent. “How has Moutai been doing lately?” needs to be understood as “the recent stock price trend of Kweichow Moutai (600519)”; “Buy 50,000 of that product we talked about yesterday” requires restoring the complete instruction from conversation history. Traditional keyword matching or shallow classification models show obvious inadequacy in such complex financial conversations.4.2 Three-Layer Memory System: The Evolution from Prompt Engineering to Context Engineering
Scenario pain points: Traditional AI systems either have no memory (every conversation starts from scratch), or only accumulate raw messages (unable to extract high-value information), and memory implementations are deeply coupled with business logic, lacking unified read/write interfaces and lifecycle management.4.3 Dual-Mode Intelligent Execution Architecture: Unifying Flexibility and Controllability
Scenario pain points: the complexity span of financial business scenarios is enormous — from simple balance queries to complex investment portfolio analysis. A single execution mode cannot cover all scenarios: pure autonomous planning mode is inefficient and unpredictable in simple scenarios, and pure workflow mode is too rigid for open-ended questions.4.4 Unified Execution Engine: The “Operating System Kernel” of Agents
Scenario pain points: each agent implementing its own execution logic leads to code duplication, inconsistent behavior, and incomplete auditing — an unacceptable compliance risk in financial-grade scenarios. Different Agents have uneven context assembly approaches, inconsistent memory read/write timing, and ad-hoc exception handling chains, making full-link logs impossible to trace through, and tool invocations lacking unified interception. This fails to meet the audit requirement of “every decision step being traceable”, and greatly increases maintenance and evolution costs under multiple orchestration modes. Solution: AgentProcessEngine serves as the unified execution entry point. The entire engine contains a pre-common layer, a strategy routing layer, and a post-common layer, forming a closed-loop architecture of “unified entry → unified scheduling → unified wrap-up”: Pre-common layer:- Permission verification: three-level verification of User-Agent-Skill.
- Input preprocessing: unified completion of file IDs and run identifiers, ensuring every subsequent layer can obtain complete, traceable input.
- Context loading: assembles short-term memory (STM) from historical messages, recalls relevant long-term memory (LTM) from the MemoryManager, reads static attributes such as risk preference from the user profile, and injects them uniformly into the execution context.
- Audit start: opens full-link structured logs, records the intent decision chain and latency metrics, providing a unified context anchor for subsequent interception points.
- Flexible strategy selection: automatically selects the execution strategy (OneAgent ReAct / the eight Multi-Agent orchestrations) based on patternType.
- MountableResource lifecycle: “mountable resources” such as memory managers, Toolkit, Skill packages, and precompiled graphs are attached on demand when the strategy starts and released when it ends, all managed uniformly by the execution context.
- Result formatting: outputs of all strategies uniformly converge into the standard AG-UI event stream — one protocol for the frontend.
- Memory writing: the user’s original text + the assistant’s full reply + metadata (session, rewritten text, intent type, matched Skill, tool invocation details) are asynchronously written back to STM / LTM / UserProfile, with the user profile continuously refined with each interaction.
- Audit close: closes unfinished streaming message segments, emits terminal-state events, prints structured logs (instance, mode, latency, text length), completing the closed loop with the pre-layer’s traceId.
- Metrics collection: Prometheus metrics endpoints are connected, collecting metrics such as total engine latency, per-phase latency, and LLM call counts.
- Runtime model overrides: system prompts, model types, skills, etc. support hot updates; the same Agent configuration can dynamically transform per user/scenario.
- Skill-level timeout and retry: independent timeout thresholds and retry strategies configured at Skill granularity, preventing long-tail tools from dragging down the entire conversation chain.
- Transparent cross-instance migration of execution context: in multi-replica deployments, requests routed to any instance can restore state, providing a foundation for canary releases and failover.
4.5 AG-UI Full-Link Streaming Interaction: A Consistent Real-Time Service Experience Across Channels
Scenario pain points: the “ask one question, wait half a minute” interaction mode of traditional AI applications leaves users unable to perceive what AI is doing. Different channels each customizing their interaction protocols leads to inconsistent experiences and high management costs. Meanwhile, some financial data is structured, and pure text output cannot effectively convey trends, comparisons, proportions, and other information. Solution: FinXScope fully adapts to the AG-UI standard protocol. Based on the Spring WebFlux reactive streaming architecture, it achieves full-link asynchronous streaming via SSE (text/event-stream). The AG-UI protocol defines 15 fine-grained event types, covering the complete interaction chain of the reasoning process, tool invocations, intermediate results, and final output. AG-UI’s standardized interaction brings four core values: Cross-channel reuse: when a new channel is connected, the frontend only needs to consume the AG-UI event stream according to the unified standard, without customizing an interaction protocol for each channel. The same event stream can be directly reused across channel frontends, significantly reducing management and development costs and ensuring a consistent intelligent service experience across terminals. Frontend-backend decoupling: the frontend only consumes the standard event stream; when the backend switches models, adds/removes tools, or adjusts strategies, the frontend requires no changes. This allows the backend to iterate independently and quickly, while the frontend only needs to maintain rendering capabilities for the standard event types. Unified observability: all Agents are monitored, alerted, and performance-analyzed based on the same set of event types. The event stream naturally provides full-link execution tracing capability. Extensible tool ecosystem: a new tool only needs to emit standard events according to the protocol to be automatically recognized and consumed by the frontend, requiring no cross-team coordinated changes. At the rendering layer, multiple standard rendering tools are built in (line charts, bar charts, pie charts, metric cards, data tables, volume charts, selectable lists, confirmation action cards, etc.), supporting placeholder-style incremental rendering and personalized component extensions. New in 2.0: workflow_command_agent converts natural language into control-operation commands; WorkflowToolRegistry lets the frontend dynamically declare controls and register them at runtime as tools invocable by the agent.4.6 Three-Layer Skill Definition System: Progressive Complexity Adaptation from Configuration to Code
Scenario pain points: the complexity span of financial business skills is large — from simple exchange rate queries to complex credit approvals. A single definition approach cannot balance conciseness and expressiveness. Solution: the three-layer skill definition system progresses by complexity: YAML configuration files (lightweight query-type): declare skill name, description, associated tools, and content in a configuration file. The framework automatically reads and batch-registers them at startup, with no code required at all. Suitable for skills with fixed content and simple logic, such as exchange rate queries and balance queries. SKILL.md + scripts (medium complexity, “documentation as contract”): create an independent folder for each skill under the skills directory. The core is a SKILL.md document, optionally accompanied by Python/Shell scripts. OneAgent relies entirely on this Markdown document to decide when to invoke the skill and how to pass parameters, making behavior predictable and auditable. Suitable for medium-complexity scenarios such as customer insights, product recommendations, and risk assessment. Java @Bean registration (complex business logic): the standard Spring Bean approach, with full type checking and IDE support, also serving as the registration method for low-level tools (such as multi-step transaction wrappers and business tools with strong consistency guarantees). Suitable for strong-consistency business scenarios such as multi-step transaction wrapping, compliance review, and credit approval. New in 2.0:- SkillsHub remote loading: versions are uniformly governed by the management platform. At service startup, all published skills are pulled in full; when the management platform publishes changes during runtime, the entire process has zero downtime, supporting version management and canary releases.
- Automatic skill permission filtering: supports three modes — NONE, FILTER, REJECT — to govern users’ permission to use skills.
4.7 Tool and Knowledge Integration: Standardized Connection to Enterprise Legacy Assets
Scenario pain points: after years of informatization, financial institutions have accumulated a large number of business systems and knowledge assets, but their interface standards vary and they are scattered across different platforms, making per-system adapter code costly to write. Meanwhile, large amounts of unstructured knowledge are hard for agents to effectively utilize. Solution: through standardized protocols and configuration-based access mechanisms, tool integration, knowledge retrieval, and permission propagation are unified as platform-level foundational capabilities, minimizing adaptation effort: Tool access: provides two standard configuration approaches — MCP (Model Context Protocol) and API Schema. Enterprises only need to declare the service address and authentication information to complete tool registration. McpClientRegistry uniformly manages the configuration, health checks, and lifecycle of all MCP connections to ensure tool availability; it also supports configuration-based access to any customer-defined Bean compliant with the MCP protocol, seamlessly connecting to customers’ legacy system capabilities with no additional development. Knowledge access: a unified Knowledge interface supports configuration-based routing across multiple knowledge sources — Bailian general RAG, Dianjin financial-domain knowledge bases, and customer-built knowledge bases can all be connected via configuration. Agents invoke knowledge retrieval through the unified Knowledge tool; the underlying layer automatically hides implementation differences between knowledge bases and sets unified quality standards for core capabilities such as tag retrieval, recall reranking, and query rewriting. Permission propagation: seamlessly connects to enterprise security systems. It provides standardized data propagation channels for tool invocation and knowledge recall interfaces, supporting end-to-end transmission of context such as identity information and channel identifiers, so that every external call made by the agent automatically inherits the user’s permission boundary, with no need to repeatedly rebuild authentication logic. New in 2.0: McpClientRegistry supports dynamic management: adding, removing, and modifying tool connections can be done at runtime, taking effect within seconds with no service restart required; newly registered tools are automatically injected into the Agent’s available list, allowing operations teams to independently take tools online and offline.4.8 Access Gateway Engine: Unified Multi-Channel Entry and Security Control
Scenario pain points: multi-channel input formats vary and need unified handling, and security threats facing AI systems such as Prompt injection need unified protection at the entry layer.- Protocol fragmentation: different clients (Web/mobile/third-party systems) submit requests in different formats, requiring the backend to adapt to each one.
- Security threats: Prompt injection, sensitive content input, and policy-violating operations — if not uniformly intercepted at the entry layer — will spread to the intent engine and execution engine, causing uncontrollable risk.
- Lack of multimodal preprocessing: if unstructured content such as images/videos/audio/documents is passed directly to the LLM, it cannot be effectively understood; content extraction must be completed at the gateway layer to enhance the Prompt.
- Inconsistent streaming output: different processing branches (pure text/multimodal/TodoList) each have their own SSE event formats and lifecycle management, resulting in high frontend integration costs.
- Loose session state management: message persistence, session title generation, and context restoration are scattered across modules, lacking a unified orchestration point.
- Protocol adaptation: compatible with 4 input formats, uniformly parsed into a standard internal representation.
- Multimodal processing: image understanding, video understanding, audio ASR, document parsing — extracted in parallel to enhance the Prompt.
- Security control: policy matching + risk scoring + action execution (pass/warn/block), supporting whitelists and a 5-minute policy cache.
- Request routing: three-way dispatch: pure text → OneAgent / multimodal → extraction + OneAgent / TodoList → direct execution.
- Streaming output orchestration: unified AG-UI Protocol event format, filtering duplicate control events, with the gateway layer uniformly emitting lifecycle events.
- Session persistence: user messages/assistant replies are automatically saved, session titles are auto-generated, and multimodal content has fallback storage.
4.9 TodoList Task Management (Newly Built in 2.0): Visualized Progress Tracking for Long-Process Tasks
Scenario pain points: targeting long-process financial tasks such as cross-border remittances and loan approvals (taking 30 seconds to several minutes), it solves the problem of the Agent’s execution process being “completely invisible” to users — not knowing how far it has progressed, not knowing whether the breakdown is correct, and being unable to continue after interruption.- Progress visibility: real-time synchronization of execution status (e.g., “2/4 complete, executing step 3”), eliminating waiting anxiety and reducing unnecessary follow-up questions.
- Verifiable planning: makes the Agent’s task decomposition logic transparent, allowing users to identify omissions or deviations before or during execution and intervene to correct course — turning passive waiting into active review.
- Resumable interruption: persistent storage of task state, supporting automatic resumption across sessions/days, guaranteeing the continuity of complex business processes.
4.10 Full-Link Configuration Hot Update and Operations Management Platform (Newly Built in 2.0): Continuous Optimization Taking Effect in Seconds at Runtime
Scenario pain points: configuration changes require going through a complete release process, resulting in low efficiency; the lack of a unified management interface makes it difficult for operations staff to adjust agent behavior.- Configuration hot update: covers all core configurations of Agent/Skill/Tool/intent tree/model/gateway. Redis Pub/Sub synchronizes across multiple instances, taking effect within seconds. ConfigVersionRegistry version management supports precise rollback.
- Operations management platform: implements full lifecycle management of agents, skills, intents, tools, and gateways: visually editing intent trees, configuring mapping relationships, registering/enabling/disabling skills, managing MCP connections, and configuring security policies. Supports building mirror runtime environments for configuration dry-run verification, comparing and evaluating multiple versions before publishing the best one. In the future, it will connect with the full-link evaluation system to realize an automated operations closed loop of “configure → dry-run → evaluate → publish the best”.
05 Why Build on AgentScope
5.1 AgentScope: A Development Framework Born for Agents
AgentScope is an AI-native application development framework open-sourced by Alibaba, designed specifically for building autonomously planning agents. Choosing it as the foundation framework is based on three key dimensions: dynamic skill governance (Tool Group on-demand activation, avoiding context overload), high-concurrency architecture (the AgentPool factory pattern is naturally stateless), and execution reliability (exponential backoff retries, and a complete Hook system implementing circuit breaking and rate limiting).5.2 Comprehensive Comparison with Traditional Frameworks
5.3 Core Extensions on Top of AgentScope
AgentScope provides solid foundational framework capabilities, but there remains a significant capability gap between a general-purpose framework and a financial-grade product. FinXScope builds six major extensions on top of AgentScope:06 The Collaboration Between Pro-Code and Low-Code
6.1 Correctly Understanding the Positioning of Pro-Code and Low-Code
In the financial industry, “pro-code or low-code” is not an either/or question, but a question of “which tool to use at which stage and in which scenario”. The two are essentially different roles in the same technical system, serving different stages of an agent’s journey from “idea” to “production”. Core advantages and applicable scenarios of low-code platforms: visual orchestration lets business personnel participate intuitively in design; rapid prototyping lets ideas quickly become demos; what-you-see-is-what-you-get debugging makes problem identification intuitive. Low-code platforms are the best choice for the business validation stage, and are also suitable for scenarios with low change frequency, short process chains (within 5-10 steps), and relatively tolerant reliability requirements. Challenges faced by low-code: when scenarios involve complex workflow orchestration, multi-turn interactions and cross-session state management, AI autonomous planning, and financial-grade production guarantees, the maintenance costs and construction complexity of low-code platforms skyrocket.6.2 The Pro-Code Value of FinXScope
FinXScope chooses the pro-code route to solve scenarios that low-code struggles to cover, while making every effort to lower the usage barrier:6.3 The Complete Closed Loop of “Incubate with Low-Code, Produce with Pro-Code”
07 Financial-Grade Capability Guarantees
7.1 Architecture Design for High Availability
FinXScope has internalized high availability as a foundational architecture characteristic since its initial design. Ultimate high-availability guarantees depend on the customer’s infrastructure capabilities, but FinXScope ensures that it itself never becomes the high-availability bottleneck.7.2 Security and Compliance System
Three-level permission control: User-Agent-Skill three-level permissions, FILTER/REJECT dual modes, cache optimization, and configurable fail-open/fail-close fault tolerance strategies. Input security: Prompt injection protection, sensitive word filtering, content moderation; policies support dynamic configuration from the admin console. Full-link auditing: complete trails of the decision process, tool invocations, and Skill logs. MDC context automatically injects traceId/spanId, making the full link traceable.7.3 Observability System
FinXScope provides a full-link observability system covering access, intent, and agent execution. Core features include: Distributed tracing: full-link tracing based on Micrometer Tracing, automatically generating a unique traceId for each request, spanning the entire lifecycle from gateway access to Agent execution. The traceId is automatically injected into all log output, supporting context propagation across asynchronous threads, making it easy to quickly locate request chains and troubleshoot issues in distributed environments. Business metric monitoring: business instrumentation through the unified BizLogger API automatically generates standard Prometheus metrics. The metric system is divided into six layers according to system architecture (access layer, presentation layer, intent layer, execution layer, tool layer, knowledge layer), with each layer independently defining metric enumerations covering dimensions such as event counts, latency statistics, active request counts, and error classification. A separate management port exposes the/actuator/prometheus endpoint for Prometheus Server scraping.
Agent lifecycle observability: deeply integrated with the AgentScope Hook mechanism, using ObservabilityHook to track 5 lifecycle stages of Agent execution: invocation entry, LLM reasoning, tool execution, summary generation, and exception handling. Each stage automatically collects latency and token usage, supporting three-level switch control (global switch → event-type switch → Agent-level override), allowing observation data collection for specific Agents or specific stages to be turned on or off on demand in production.
Structured logging: BizLogger provides dual-mode log output: each business log is simultaneously output to the console in a human-readable format and written to a separate file in structured JSON format. Logs automatically carry context information such as traceId, sessionId, and userId, supporting machine parsing and integration with log platforms.
SPI extension mechanism: the framework provides three layers of SPI extension points, supporting user-customized observability behavior without modifying framework code.
- Log output extension: register a custom BizLoggerProvider to replace or supplement the default log processing logic.
- Hook registration extension: implement AgentHookProvider to inject custom lifecycle hooks into Agents.
- Data extraction extension: implement HookLogFormatter to customize data extraction and formatting logic for Hook events.
08 Implementation Practice Guide
8.1 Four-Step Integration Path
8.2 Deployment Modes and Resource Estimates
1. FinXScope supports two usage modes:- Standalone application: packaged as an executable Fat JAR / Docker image, running independently and providing APIs externally.
- Dependency import: imported by other applications via Maven as a Spring Boot Starter, with Agent capabilities automatically wired.
- It is a reference implementation/source code in a code repository.
- It is a dependency package (JAR) in a Maven repository.
8.3 Quick-Start Recommendations
09 FinXScope 2.0 Version Evolution
FinXScope 2.0 completes the leap from a “single-agent runtime framework” to an “enterprise-grade agent runtime and management platform”:- Multi-agent collaboration system (newly built): a unified workflow execution engine supporting eight orchestration strategies; workflow mounting onto OneAgent (MountableResource mechanism); subprocess event passthrough (GraphNodeEmitter); DAG graph executor (topological sort, parallel within a layer, serial between layers).
- Permission and security system (newly built): User-Agent-Skill three-level permissions, FILTER/REJECT dual modes, permission cache optimization, fail-open/fail-close fault tolerance. JWT authentication integration.
- Observability system (newly built): BizLogger dual-mode output, ObservabilityHook automatic observation, BizLoggerProvider SPI extension.
- High availability and statelessness (major upgrade): STM → Redis, LTM → PostgreSQL, configuration hot update engine (Redis Pub/Sub + ConfigVersionRegistry), fully stateless.
- Intent layer enhancements: runtime intent tree overrides, runtime model overrides, intent tree management API (CRUD + version rollback + intent switch tracking).
- Access layer and presentation layer enhancements: gateway engine refactoring, DocumentParserService multi-format document parsing, workflow_command_agent, WorkflowToolRegistry dynamic tool injection.
- TodoList task management (newly built): two-level step management, 7 Tools, Hook auto-injection, Pipeline integration.
- MCP configuration management enhancements: McpClientRegistry dynamic management, CustomMcpToolsInjector auto-injection, configuration synchronization.
- HITL human intervention system: tool-level interception of sensitive operations with human confirmation; Agent memory snapshots and resumable breakpoints; distributed persistence of suspended state; automatic determination of user confirm/reject intent.
- A2A multi-agent collaboration protocol: standard Agent-to-Agent protocol server and consumer ends; automatic AgentCard generation and multi-mode service discovery; synchronous/streaming dual-channel cross-Agent invocation; bidirectional event translation between AG-UI and A2A; Nacos registry integration and dynamic refresh.
- Sandbox secure execution system: support for multiple mainstream sandbox backends; asynchronous sandbox creation and session-level instance reuse; file upload/download and workspace synchronization; command execution isolation and timeout control; automatic deployment and keep-alive management of skill resources.