Aims and Scope

Aims

The Journal of Intelligent Financial Systems and Autonomous Management (JIFSAM) publishes research on how artificial intelligence and autonomous systems are designed, used and governed in finance. It takes original research, systematic and methodological reviews, and short communications.

Papers are judged on originality, sound method, reproducibility and a clearly stated contribution to theory, practice or policy. Single-discipline studies are welcome. So is work that combines computer science with finance, economics, operations or management.

Scope

The scope covers three subject areas. The lists below give examples and are not exhaustive; a paper outside them but inside one of the three areas will be considered.

Intelligent financial systems

  • Algorithmic, high-frequency and automated trading
  • Market, credit, liquidity and operational risk analytics
  • Portfolio optimisation, asset allocation and robo-advisory systems
  • Machine learning for fraud detection, anti-money-laundering and financial crime
  • Regulatory technology (RegTech) and supervisory technology (SupTech)
  • Credit scoring, alternative-data lending and automated underwriting
  • Decentralised finance (DeFi), blockchain, distributed ledgers and smart contracts
  • Payment systems, digital currencies and central bank digital currencies
  • Financial forecasting and time-series modelling
  • Natural language processing of financial text, sentiment and disclosures

Autonomous management and decision systems

  • Autonomous and semi-autonomous decision-making in finance and management
  • Agent-based and multi-agent models of markets and institutions
  • Reinforcement learning for trading, allocation and operational control
  • Automation of treasury, compliance and back-office work
  • Decision-support and recommendation systems for managers
  • Human oversight of AI in financial decisions
  • Process automation and operational resilience
  • Enterprise risk management informed by AI methods

Foundations, methods and governance

  • Financial machine learning, deep learning and generative models
  • Econometrics, computational finance and quantitative methods
  • Optimisation, simulation and stochastic modelling for finance
  • Explainability, interpretability and reliability of financial AI
  • Financial data engineering and data quality
  • Ethics, accountability, fairness and bias in autonomous financial systems
  • Regulation and policy for AI in finance
  • Privacy, security and trust in financial infrastructure

Examples of papers in scope

  • A reinforcement learning method for portfolio rebalancing across changing market regimes
  • An explainable model for predicting credit default from alternative data
  • A multi-agent simulation of liquidity in decentralised exchanges
  • Real-time fraud detection in high-volume payment networks
  • A framework for human oversight of autonomous trading systems
  • A pipeline that extracts risk signals from regulatory filings
  • A stress test for AI-driven credit portfolios under macroeconomic shocks
  • A systematic review of explainability methods in financial risk modelling

Papers usually declined at the desk

Every submission is checked for fit, method and originality before it goes to reviewers. The following are normally declined at that stage:

  • Finance or economics theory with no computational or autonomous-systems element
  • General machine learning papers with no clear financial or management application
  • Market reports, product announcements or feasibility notes without a research contribution
  • Qualitative organisational studies with no analytical, empirical or computational component
  • Trading strategies or back-tests that cannot be reproduced or generalised
  • Commentary on cryptocurrencies or markets without a research method
  • Literature summaries that offer no methodological synthesis

If you are unsure whether a paper fits, send a short pre-submission enquiry through the Contact page.

Article types

  • Original Research Article. A full-length empirical, methodological or theoretical study with new findings.
  • Systematic or Methodological Review. A structured synthesis following PRISMA, bibliometric or a comparable method.
  • Short Communication. A concise report of a focused finding or a brief methodological note.
  • Editorial. By invitation only, written by the editors or invited contributors.

Length and format for each type are given in the Author Guidelines.