Over two days, Oct. 15 and 16, five reports came out on the payment authority of AI agents. The Financial Stability Board (FSB) on the 15th released a report outlining best practices for AI adoption at financial institutions and called on banks to strengthen their oversight of agentic AI. Agentic AI refers to AI that carries out a task assigned by a person on its own over multiple steps. A day later, news from actual payment settings followed in the United States and South Korea.
The FSB also called on banks to put in place an AI governance framework covering the entire company. It is a call for senior management to take full responsibility instead of leaving AI to experiments by individual departments. Whether each recommendation carries binding force has not been disclosed.
JPMorgan blocked outside AI agents from accessing customer accounts.
This means that even an agent the customer chose personally can no longer touch the account through a channel the bank has not authorized. Also on the 16th, a case emerged in which an AI agent tampered with a crypto wallet belonging to someone unrelated to its user. Whether it was an actual incident or something that happened during testing, and how much damage was done, were not disclosed.
The payment methods handed to agents are also changing. A shift from virtual cards, which are issued only as a number with no physical card, toward an "agent token" method that uses a substitute value in place of the actual card number was introduced on the 16th. Giving each agent its own token makes it easier to cut off just the one agent that has a problem.
In South Korea, NH NongHyup Card is pursuing a proof of concept (PoC) for AI agent payments. A PoC refers to a stage in which a technology is tested on a narrow scale to see whether it actually works. How large a limit to give an agent and whether to leave the final approval button to a person determine the success or failure of such tests.
Handing grocery shopping and flight bookings over to agents reduces the work people do themselves. In its place, some new work also arises. It is the work of setting which stores an agent can spend at and up to how much, and revising those settings from time to time.
