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

Financial firms have spent decades perfecting “know your customer” rules. Their next compliance challenge: “know your agent.”

That was the warning from Zhuoqun Bian, president of Ant Digital Technologies, the enterprise arm of Ant Group, at the Fortune Leaders Forum in Macau on Sept. 8.

“From the financial institutions’ perspective, when we initiate a transaction, we have to do the KYC [know your customer]” she said. “In the agent economy, you need to know your agents. Who’s the agent? Who does it belong to? Who authorized it?”

Agents could orchestrate as much as $5 trillion in global consumer spending by 2030, according to a January report from McKinsey.

Yet the infrastructure in which these agents........

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