Tier 3: Business unit governance
Each major business unit has a designated Business Unit AI Lead who is accountable for the tokenomics of that unit’s workloads. A senior business leader, not an engineer.
Tier 4: Workload operating teams
As introduced in our 4th article, How banks bend the AI cost curve before competitors, every meaningful workload has three named owners: business, technical, and risk. Article 4 covered what those owners do at the workload level. This tier defines where those owners sit in the institutional structure. The three-owner discipline is the single highest-leverage governance change a bank can make. More about the tiers in the PDF version of the article.
How tokenomics augments existing roles instead of adding headcount
The most common mistake banks make when reading governance frameworks like this one is to reach for the org chart and start sketching new boxes. Tokenomics does not require a new department. It requires every role that already touches AI, in Finance, Risk, Technology, Compliance, and the business lines, to take on a clearly defined tokenomics responsibility as part of what they already do. The Chief Financial Officer (CFO) and financial planning and analysis (FP&A) team extend their remit to AI consumption. Model Risk Management extends its validation remit to generative and agentic workloads. The Chief Information Officer (CIO) owns the platform investment decision and deployment gate standards. Business unit sponsors hold outcome density to account for the workloads their units run.
The leadership question that decides everything
The first article of this series asked who, by name, is the bank’s accountable executive for the economics of intelligence. This is where that question gets answered. The question is who, by name, is the bank’s accountable executive for the economics of intelligence. If the answer is not a single name and a clear remit, the bank does not yet have tokenomics. It has AI activity. The banks that will lead this decade are those in which a named, senior, empowered executive owns the economics of intelligence with the same clarity that the Treasurer owns liquidity, the Chief Risk Officer (CRO) owns risk, and the CFO owns capital.
What the full article covers
Governance frameworks look neat on paper and messy in execution. The PDF closes that gap. Inside: the full 10-decision RACI mapping every major tokenomics decision to an accountable role across all four tiers, the standing membership of the Tokenomics Council in full, and the practical observation on why AI Centers of Excellence rarely survive the transition. Plus the four functional playbooks for Finance, Risk, Technology, and business lines, showing exactly which existing roles take on which tokenomics responsibility without a single new hire.
