Welcome back to Fintech Takes! I’m Alex Johnson, joined once again by Dan Murphy (partner at Allon Advisors and former CFPB official who worked on the Section 1033 open banking rule) to ask some annoying questions about agentic finance.
We start in Toronto, at the FDATA Global Summit, where AI agents effectively hijacked an open banking conference and screen-scraping veterans began to recognize a familiar fight.
From there, we follow the flow of a transaction as it might go through an AI agent, checkpoint by checkpoint.
Highlights include:
-
If we already struggle with KYB, how will we verify agents that can be spun up by the thousands and killed once they stop being useful — especially without a national digital identity system?
-
Who decides what an agent can actually do? Dan walks through frameworks in the UK, Australia, and Brazil, and confesses he once wrote off variable recurring payments as just subscriptions. (They are not.)
-
Dan’s hot take on the L word: whoever asks where liability lies is usually the one holding it and trying to get out of it. And why consumer trust has to come before the liability fights, not after.
-
When an agent knows more than the person it represents, whose interests does it serve? What can fiduciary law teach us about a technology built around swarms of agents?
The agentic economy will land in financial services first. How these questions get answered in the industry will determine what agents do in healthcare, education, and beyond.
—
This episode is brought to you by Increase.
Increase offers API-first banking for ambitious technology companies. Companies like Coast, Gusto, and Ramp rely on Increase technology to process more than $500B annualized in payments, card transactions, and loans. Learn more at https://increase.com/
—
Sign up for Alex’s Fintech Takes newsletter for the latest insightful analysis on fintech trends, along with a heaping pile of pop culture references and copious footnotes. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday: https://workweek.com/brand/fintech-takes/
And for more exclusive insider content, don’t forget to check out my YouTube page.
—
Follow Alex:
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJgfH47QEwbQmkQlz1V9rQA/videos
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexhjohnson
X: https://www.twitter.com/AlexH_Johnson
—
Follow Dan: