'Know your agent': Banks face a new compliance challenge as AI agents shop and pay on their own | Fortune
Banks and card networks are racing to verify who—or what—is spending money.
Financial Institutions Face New Compliance Challenge with AI Agents
The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) agents is presenting a fresh compliance hurdle for banks and other financial firms that have long refined “know your customer” (KYC) procedures. At the Fortune Leaders Forum in Macau on September 8, Zhuoqun Bian, president of Ant Digital Technologies, warned that regulators will soon demand a “know your agent” approach, asking institutions to identify the autonomous software behind each transaction, verify its ownership and confirm its authorization.
The Growing Influence of AI Agents
Industry analysts project that AI‑driven agents could direct up to $5 trillion in consumer purchases worldwide by 2030, a figure cited in a McKinsey report released in January. Despite this projected scale, the payment and verification infrastructure that underpins today’s financial system was built for human users, not for software that can act independently. Bian argued that the entire technical stack will need to be redesigned or significantly upgraded to accommodate agent‑centric activity.
The Need for Interoperability
On September 6, Ant International—Ant Group’s global payments division—announced a joint effort with Mastercard and Visa to develop a “know your agent” interoperability framework. The initiative aims to allow card networks, digital wallets and online marketplaces to recognize and trust AI agents across different platforms. The three firms will coordinate their work through BuildFin.ai, a collaborative platform organized by the Monetary Authority of Singapore, the city‑state’s central bank.
Challenges in Implementing AI Agent Compliance
An April briefing from the International Monetary Fund highlighted a fundamental tension: AI agents generate probabilistic, adaptive responses that can vary from one query to the next, whereas payment rails demand deterministic outcomes, clear legal certainty and well‑defined accountability. The IMF warned that without predictable rules, the stability of payment systems could be jeopardized. Banks, therefore, must assess whether their existing technology can keep up with the fluid nature of autonomous agents.
Operational and Compliance Concerns
Benson Wong, managing director and head of digital at JPMorgan Private Bank, stressed that the primary risk lies not in the technology itself but in the operating models, processes, and control frameworks surrounding it. He noted that a simple misinformation error by an agent might cause embarrassment, but a flaw in an agent‑driven workflow could have far‑reaching financial consequences. Wong summed up the emerging priority by stating that institutions need to understand their agents even more thoroughly than they understand their customers.
The Future of AI Agent Regulation
As AI agents become an integral part of everyday commerce, financial institutions will need to adapt to a new regulatory environment that emphasizes agent identification and accountability. Bian’s call for a “know your agent” standard underscores the industry’s move toward shared standards and collaborative frameworks. By establishing common protocols, banks, card issuers and regulators can aim to keep AI‑mediated transactions secure, transparent and compliant with the broader goals of financial stability.
Source: fortune.com · 2026-09-19