AI Transforming the Financial Landscape

On October 9, enterprise AI company Sierra published the first draft of the Personal Agent Protocol, known as “Poppy,” an open protocol designed to help personal AI agents interact with businesses on a user’s behalf. The protocol had been announced earlier that week with Meta, Genesys, Instinct, NiCE, Rocket, Shopify, Stripe and Walmart.

Founded in 2023, Sierra is a privately held, venture-capital-backed company that develops AI agents for customer interactions. It was co-founded by Bret Taylor, who also serves as chairman of OpenAI.

With publication of the draft, Sierra announced 35 additional design partners, including Mastercard, Visa, PayPal, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and OpenAI, which will participate in the protocol’s design process. Poppy’s expanding participation across technology, banking, payments and commerce highlights growing industry activity around interoperability as AI agents increasingly interact with businesses across platforms and services.

Speaking at Sibos 2026 in Miami on September 29, Federal Reserve Governor Christopher Waller examined how AI could reshape cross-border payments and commerce. He said AI could improve sanctions and anti-money-laundering screening, cybersecurity defenses, payment routing, foreign-exchange conversion and liquidity optimization.

Waller distinguished between agent-assisted commerce, where AI helps consumers search and shop, but the customer makes the decisions and payment, and agent-delegated commerce, where customers authorize agents to shop and pay autonomously within defined constraints.

He expects consumer-to-business (C2B) transactions to be the first wave, initially led by assisted models, while noting that business-to-business (B2B) payments may be particularly well suited to agents because purchases frequently follow rules such as approved suppliers and budget limits. Agents could eventually negotiate supplier terms and optimize payment strategies, although higher B2B transaction values increase the consequences of mistakes or unauthorized activity.

Waller also highlighted barriers to scaling agentic commerce, particularly establishing trust that agents are authorized to act on a buyer’s behalf. He pointed to industry efforts to develop standards governing agent behavior and raised the question of whether agentic payment ecosystems will develop as open, interoperable systems or closed platforms.

The Independent Community Bankers of America (ICBA) has sued the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) over rules allowing cryptocurrency firms to obtain national trust bank charters.

Filed October 2 in federal court in Washington, D.C., the lawsuit argues that the OCC exceeded its statutory authority by extending charters to companies conducting activities beyond traditional trust services. ICBA says crypto firms operating under these charters are not subject to equivalent requirements for capital, liquidity, regulatory supervision and FDIC insurance, potentially creating consumer confusion about protections. The OCC has approved several such charters, which allow firms to hold and manage customer assets and facilitate payments but do not permit them to accept cash deposits or make loans.

China has proposed new export controls covering 23 AI-related technologies, including large models, AI agents, chip designs and computing clusters, as part of a broader revision involving 40 technologies. The proposal would restrict exports of core technologies such as model weights and source code for certain advanced models, while exempting technology already made public through open-source releases or published research. Chinese companies could also continue providing overseas access to models through websites, apps and APIs.

The government said the measures are intended to prevent misuse and keep AI under human control. A temporary registration requirement for covered technology exports took effect October 16, while the proposed changes remain open for public comment until November 15.

The Financial Stability Board (FSB), an international body that coordinates financial regulators and standard-setting bodies across major economies, finalized 12 sound practices for financial institutions adopting AI. The practices cover organization-wide governance and the AI lifecycle, including board and senior-management oversight, risk assessment, data governance, explainability, human oversight, cyber risk and third-party AI dependencies. The FSB says institutions should tailor the practices to their risk profiles and integrate them into existing frameworks.

The U.S. has a direct role in the FSB: the Federal Reserve, SEC and U.S. Treasury are represented in its governance, and Michelle W. Bowman, Federal Reserve Vice Chair for Supervision, chairs the FSB’s Standing Committee on Supervisory and Regulatory Cooperation. Although the practices are not U.S. regulation, U.S. regulators helped develop the framework, making it relevant to the evolving U.S. approach to AI risk management in financial services.