Waller distinguished agent-assisted activity, where a person approves the transaction, from agent-delegated activity, where software acts within delegated authority. He identified authentication, liability and fraud as the principal barriers to autonomous payments and argued that agents will need to carry usable identity, consent and payment credentials across systems.
He also described potential uses in payment routing, foreign exchange, liquidity optimisation, machine-to-machine payments and cross-border compliance, while warning that closed ecosystems could undermine interoperability.
FMI WORLD analysis: Agentic payments shift the trust problem from the endpoint into the transaction path. Payment systems will have to distinguish the customer, the delegated software actor and the authority granted for a specific transaction. That puts credential portability, revocation, auditability and liability allocation alongside speed and cost as core infrastructure design questions.
OCC’s same-day launch of an agentic security-investigation workflow shows that the technology is already entering operational controls at an FMI. The structural opportunity is real, but the evidence remains early and institution-specific.
Central banks, payment-system operators, banks, card and real-time-payment networks, digital-identity providers, AML and sanctions teams, merchants, software-agent platforms, cloud vendors, regulators and infrastructure risk functions.
Watch for standards that bind identity, delegated authority and payment credentials; liability allocation for agent errors and fraud; revocation and exception handling; cross-border compliance design; central-bank or network pilots; and evidence that open interoperability can be maintained across competing agent ecosystems.