Faith Framework (v1.0) - Unified Agentic AI Governance for the Indian Financial Sector

As Banks, Non-Banking Financial Companies (NBFCs), and Fintechs in India transition from predictive machine learning to autonomous Agentic Artificial Intelligence (AI), AI governance professionals face an acute operational bottleneck: regulatory fragmentation. Deploying autonomous agents requires reconciling the RBI FREE-AI Framework (2025), the DPDP Act (2023), the NIST AI RMF (1.0), and OWASP LLM controls (2025). This paper introduces The FAITH Framework (v1.0) (Financial AI Trust & Human-Control Framework), a unified operational meta-framework tailored for Indian financial institutions. FAITH v1.0 distills these intersecting regimes into five enforceable pillars (Financial Controls First, Accountable Data Use, Interpretable by Design, Trust but Continuously Verify, and Humans Stay Accountable), complete with a 15-control catalog, 3LoD implementation guidance, and evidentiary audit mappings for RBI supervisory compliance.