Financial firms spent decades building 'know your customer' systems. Now they face a different test: 'know your agent.'
That warning came from Zhuoqun Bian, president of Ant Digital Technologies, at the Fortune Leaders Forum in Macau on Sept. 8. 'In the agent economy, you need to know your agents. Who’s the agent? Who does it belong to? Who authorized it?' she said.
The stakes are getting larger fast. According to a January report from McKinsey, agents could orchestrate as much as $5 trillion in global consumer spending by 2030. But the infrastructure they would use was built for humans, not autonomous software.
'Looking forward, all the infrastructure needs to be rebuilt or enhanced for agents,' Bian said.
The issue is now moving from theory to payments. On Sept. 6, Ant International, Ant Group’s global payments arm, said it had begun working with Mastercard and Visa on a 'know your agent' interoperability framework. The goal is to let card networks, digital wallets and marketplaces recognize trusted AI agents across ecosystems. The companies will work through BuildFin.ai, an industry platform convened by the Monetary Authority of Singapore.
The International Monetary Fund laid out the technical problem in an April note. AI agents are probabilistic and adaptive, meaning the same prompt can produce different answers, while payment systems must return the same answer every time. The IMF said payment rails 'rely on predictable rules, legal certainty, and clear accountability structures to ensure trust and financial stability.'
For banks, the harder question is whether their own systems can keep up. Benson Wong, managing director and head of digital at JPMorgan Private Bank, said the core challenge is not the agent itself. 'It’s always around the operating model, the processes, and the compliance and the controls,' he said.
Wong also warned that the cost of a mistake rises with autonomy. A wrong answer to an information request may create only an embarrassing moment, he said. But if agentic workflows are not set up correctly, 'there are vastly scaled impacts.'
Bian put the point plainly: 'You need to know your agents much more than you know your customers.'
The market has already voted: automation is moving into spending and payments whether the compliance state likes it or not. Capital will follow the firms that can build clear rules, predictable rails and accountability fast enough to match the new technology.
