Welcome back to Fintech Takes. I’m Alex Johnson, joined by two of my favorite repeat guests: Steve Boms (Executive Director of FDATA North America) and Dan Murphy (Founder of Sunset Park Advisors; formerly CFPB).
We set aside Section 1033 for an hour to talk about agentic finance; what happens when AI agents don’t just read your financial data, but act on it.
First up, the question any skeptical consumer would ask: robo-advisors already exist, so what’s new here? Dan’s answer took the conversation back further than I expected, to a pre-fintech era of credit counselors, financial advisors, and deposit brokers who worked the phones shopping a client’s savings around for a better CD rate.
Then, Dan and Steve walk me through a framework from FDATA’s forthcoming white paper splitting agentic finance into three layers: read, instruct, and transact. We get into what each layer actually requires on liability, consent, and fiduciary duty, and what the UK, Australia, and Brazil have already built in this space that the US hasn’t.
We also dig into the use cases that could change someone’s day, like an “anti-inertia” tool that moves your savings the moment your bank stops paying a competitive rate.
Tune in for a conversation about what it means to give an AI permission to spend your money, and why the rulebook we already have may be more ready for this than anyone expects.
FDATA North America published a white paper on this exact topic, which you should read here: https://bit.ly/4wiB0a4
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https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevenboms/
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https://www.linkedin.com/in/danieljmurphy01/
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