Agentic AI and the rewiring of financial services power

Agentic AI represents a decisive break from the assistive technologies that have defined the past decade of fintech innovation.

Agentic AI and the rewiring of financial services

These systems do not merely recommend or optimise; they evaluate options, select outcomes, authorise actions and execute transactions across interconnected systems, all within pre-set human constraints.

In financial services, where margins have long depended on friction, opacity and behavioural inertia, that shift is profoundly destabilising.

The result is not incremental efficiency, but a reordering of the financial services stack itself — one in which value migrates away from traditional intermediaries and towards those that control intent, orchestration, execution and trust.

Where Intent Becomes Infrastructure

The most consequential changes introduced by agentic AI do not occur at the payment rails. Cards, real-time payments and settlement infrastructure remain largely intact.

Instead, disruption concentrates higher up the stack, at the point where consumer and business intent is formed, interpreted and actioned.

Large technology platforms are racing to position AI agents as the new interface for economic decision-making. Google’s agent-to-agent payment protocols seek to anchor transactions close to search and discovery.

OpenAI’s partnership with Stripe reframes conversational interfaces as transactional environments.

Visa and Mastercard, meanwhile, are encoding agent identity, cryptographic verification and evidentiary trails into their networks to preserve liability structures in a world without a human “click”.

The common strategy is clear: control intent, and distribution follows. Whoever intermediates the decision controls the flow of value.

Orchestration: The New Bottleneck Layer

Beneath the consumer-facing interfaces, a largely invisible orchestration layer is emerging as a structural choke point.

This middleware determines which services are reachable, composable and trusted by autonomous agents. As with early cloud computing, users may never see this layer — but it governs market access.

In payments, this manifests as cautious adaptation rather than radical reinvention.

Networks and acquirers are embedding agent identity signals, tokenisation and intent verification into familiar authorisation flows.

Autonomy is permitted, but only within guardrails that existing systems can recognise. The aim is continuity without fragmentation: allowing agents to transact while preserving compliance, dispute resolution and accountability.

From Nudging to Delegation

For years, fintech innovation focused on improving access while leaving agency untouched.

Mobile banking, embedded payments and APIs smoothed interactions, but humans still made the final decisions. Even behavioural nudging operated within a fundamentally human-driven execution layer.

Agentic AI collapses that separation.

Discovery, comparison, authentication, payment, financing and post-purchase management compress into a continuous, machine-mediated workflow. The human role shifts upstream: from operator to author of preferences, constraints and risk tolerance.

This transition is already underway. Tens of millions of daily AI interactions are now commerce-related, signalling a shift in how users seek value.

In this environment, financial products no longer compete for human attention but for agent selection. Brand affinity matters less than price, suitability and performance against data-driven criteria.

The Commoditisation Risk for Financial Products

As agents optimise relentlessly, undifferentiated financial products face extinction. Retail banking loyalty erodes when switching costs vanish.

Asset management becomes vulnerable as autonomous systems dynamically allocate capital without emotional bias. Payments, lending and insurance risk becoming fully automated utilities, selected and reselected continuously by competing agents.

Under such conditions, distribution shifts away from traditional financial institutions and towards non-financial platforms that embed financial functionality seamlessly.

Margins compress, transparency increases and behavioural economics gives way to algorithmic optimisation.

Compatibility Over Disruption in Commerce

Commercial products face a slower transition than financial services, largely because physical goods still carry experiential and aesthetic value.

Yet agentic commerce introduces a familiar problem in a new form: fragmentation. Merchants cannot integrate individually with dozens of evolving agent frameworks.

Here, compatibility becomes the organising principle. Execution must be portable without disintermediating existing roles.

Agents can place orders, apply promotions and select fulfilment, but the merchant remains the merchant of record. Data ownership, customer relationships and regulatory responsibilities stay put.

Previous attempts at embedded commerce failed precisely because platforms tried to absorb these roles.

Banks at a Crossroads

Banks face the harshest adjustment.

Agentic decision-making directly undermines business models built on complexity and delay. Survival requires rapid adaptation: standardised pricing, transparent eligibility rules, predictable rewards and clean APIs that agents can consume.

Banks still possess valuable assets — identity infrastructure, compliance capabilities, underwriting expertise and access to capital.

Integrated intelligently, these can position banks as trusted contributors within autonomous value chains rather than obsolete endpoints. Those that fail to adapt risk fading into irrelevance as agents optimise around them.

Follow the Money, Follow the Agent

Contrary to initial fears, agentic architectures may prove more auditable than today’s systems.

Know Your Agent protocols, cryptographic identity and machine-readable compliance create detailed transaction trails. Regulation itself may become programmable, with agents interacting directly with supervisory systems.

The open question is liability: who bears responsibility when autonomous systems err. Regulators will need to move quickly. Infrastructure is advancing faster than policy, and efficiency gains are shifting from experimental to existential.

Agentic AI is not a distant prospect. It is a structural shift already reshaping incentives, power and profit across financial services. Those who adapt early will define the new stack. Those who wait will be optimised away.