Agentic finance – the customer is in control

Agentic finance. What is that? For me, it is where you can designate your financial life to an intelligent, connected network. The core of that network is: who are you? There is you and then there is your digital twin. There are two you’s: the physical you and the digital you.

So we have to start with how to build the digital you. Most of us were naïve about this. By way of example, twenty years ago, I opened a Facebook account and, within months, linked with all the people I worked with. Then I realised Facebook was personal. Why am I sharing everything about me with my workmates? So, I opened another Facebook account: one personal and one general.

This is the key to where we are today: the real you, the digital you, the general you and the personal you. In other words, we don’t just have a digital twin – we have digital triplets or even quads.

This is where agentic AI steps in. Agentic AI can manage your digital personas. Like the Where’s Wally example for Zero Knowledge Proof (ZKP), agentic AI would only allow the part of your identity to be revealed digitally that is relevant to the transaction, and this is where agentic finance gets really interesting because agentic finance can do bot-to-bot exchanges with ZKP real-time, all the time.

What does this mean?

It means that you can build an agentic finance infomediary who has your whole identity, but only reveals what is needed, when it is needed and why it is needed. You can do more than this. You can have an agentic app that does all of your transactions on your behalf without intervention. You have an agentic advisor who alerts you only when needed; otherwise, everything is handled automatically for you.

In other words, it is the intelligent infomediary that has been discussed for decades – my first debate about this was back in the 1990s – but it is finally emerging. But what is an agentic financial infomediary?

Well, as mentioned above, it does everything for you based on your delegated identity information and designated financial requirements. It does everything bot-to-bot and peer-to-peer, and you only need to be involved when there are alerts. Alerts regarding your inability to cover a payment; alerts where your portfolio is at risk; alerts when there is a suspicious transaction; alerts when anything is exceptional. In the meantime, it just does everything for you, completely automated, delegated and designated.

The key to the agentic finance infomediary agent is the design. It starts with getting your identity parameters right – when to reveal what of you – and then to get the financial parameters right – when to alert you and why. More than this is that it is all backed by an Open Banking world of APIs, but what we are now doing is building the next generation of Open Banking APIs and BaaS (Banking-as-a-Service).

What we are doing is giving the customer the ability to have a huge number of financial providers for payments, investments, savings and loans integrated into an intelligent system that we control. The financial providers are now just data feeds and subordinate to the customer, because the customer is in control.

In fact, it makes me smile as there were many discussions in the end of the 1990s about who owns the customer relationship. No-one owns the customer relationship today, except the customer … and the customer has delegated that relationship to their designated digital agent. That’s what agentic finance is all about.