Know your agent: Enabling autonomous financial services

David Birch and Jelena Hoffart
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David Birch: Principal, 15Mb, UK
Jelena Hoffart: Mastercard, USA

Journal of Digital Banking, 2025, vol. 10, issue 2, 123-134

Abstract: In February 2025, OpenAI announced ‘Operator’, an agent that includes a computerusing agent (CUA) model, which means that it does not need an application programming interface (API) to access services but can use buttons and navigate menus just as people do. Currently, an Operator requires human supervision to complete certain tasks, so a consumer needs to take control, for example, to enter payment information. However, with the advent of CUAs, the practical evolution of full-blown agentic commerce in strategic timeframes is well underway. Agents will go online to obtain services, look for an agent or an agentic API and then, if no such access methods are found, simply access the web pages as a human customer does. Agents will need more than API or web access to execute financial transactions on behalf of individuals or organisations; however, they will need authorisation. This means that agents need a fundamental property to deliver for their users: identity. This paper demonstrates that extending digital identity to agents is a fundamental enabler for bots to access financial services on behalf of individuals or organisations (or, indeed, themselves) to create a new financial world that can admit nonhuman customers to generate better outcomes for consumers and businesses. To deliver this vision of financial health for all, the paper posits that companies must first have a digital identity infrastructure that can provide identification, authentication and authorisation for not only financial institutions and their customers, but also for the customers’ agents. Know-your-customer (KYC) is necessary, as is know-your-business (KYB) and knowyour- employee (KYE). But without know-your-agent (KYA), which is much more complicated than KYC, KYB and KYE, there will be no progress. This article is also included in The Business & Management Collection, which can be accessed at https://hstalks.com/business/.

Keywords: AI; robots; bots; agents; smart wallets; open finance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E5 G2 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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