'Know your agent': Banks face a new compliance challenge as AI agents shop and pay on their own

Financial firms have spent decades getting comfortable with know-your-customer rules. Now they’re staring at a newer, stranger problem: know your agent.

That was the message from Zhuoqun Bian, president of Ant Digital Technologies, at the Fortune Leaders Forum in Macau on Sept. 8. Her point was simple enough. Banks know how to check a person before a transaction. In the agent economy, they’ll need to check the software acting on that person’s behalf: who it is, who owns it, and who authorized it.

The scale is not theoretical. McKinsey said in a January report that agents could drive as much as $5 trillion in global consumer spending by 2030. But the payments world was built for humans, not software that can act, adapt, and keep moving. Bian said that looking ahead, the infrastructure itself will need to be rebuilt or upgraded for agents.

Ant International, the global payments arm of Ant Group, already moved on Sept. 6. It said it was working with Mastercard and Visa on a know-your-agent interoperability framework designed to help card networks, digital wallets, and marketplaces identify trusted AI agents across systems. The project runs through BuildFin.ai, an industry platform convened by the Monetary Authority of Singapore.

There’s also a deeper problem than identity checks. In an April note, the International Monetary Fund said AI agents are probabilistic and adaptive, which means the same prompt can produce different answers, while payment systems need consistent answers every time. JPMorgan Private Bank’s Benson Wong put the practical version of that bluntly: the issue is usually not the agent’s raw technology, but the operating model, the processes, and the controls around it. And if those workflows fail, the damage scales fast.