A central bank puts Know Your Agent on its agenda

The Hong Kong Monetary Authority has launched Project SAGE, short for Securing Agentic Finance with Governance and Enablement, to support practical uses of AI agents in financial services while putting governance in place. The HKMA describes agentic finance as the industry moving beyond internal use of AI to explore how agents might make financial services more efficient and secure, with risks that need to be addressed for that to happen responsibly.

Machine payments are named directly. The first of the project's four areas is market development and use cases, and the HKMA lists three kinds to explore: business-to-consumer, such as agentic commerce and everyday payments; business-to-business, such as procurement and treasury management; and machine-to-machine, such as usage-based payments for digital services. That last category is exactly where pay-per-request protocols for agents operate.

The other three areas are the hard parts. Agent identity covers ways to verify an AI agent's identity and the authority delegated to it, including what the HKMA calls Know Your Agent practices and authentication mechanisms. Interoperability standards cover industry discussion of the standards and protocols agents would use to interact across the ecosystem. Legal and regulatory frameworks cover governance, liability and consumer protection. The release names no particular payment protocol or standard.

To run it, the HKMA has set up an Agentic Finance Expert Group of financial institutions, technology providers, professional services firms and academics. Chief executive Eddie Yue says the aim is to foster innovation while making sure agentic finance serves users and protects the stability of the financial system. The project sets out areas to explore rather than rules; it is a regulator signalling which questions it expects to answer, starting with who an agent is and who answers for it.