The future of artificial intelligence (AI)-driven autonomous payments will depend less on advances in artificial intelligence (AI) than on how effectively financial institutions govern the technology, with clear accountability, security controls and interoperability needed to build trust, UOB Global Economics & Markets Research said in a recent report.

In its report, the bank said the industry was moving towards “bounded autonomy”, where AI agents could execute financial transactions within explicit mandates, defined permissions, continuous monitoring and auditable decision-making, rather than operating without restrictions.

While the technology needed to initiate and execute payments autonomously was advancing rapidly, challenges remained in liability frameworks, agent identity standards and interoperability across financial institutions, jurisdictions and settlement networks.

These issues were institutional challenges requiring coordination among technology providers, financial institutions, regulators and policymakers, the report said.

In a mature agentic payments environment, AI agents could help corporate treasurers optimize liquidity and coordinate financial workflows, while operating within limits established by their institutions.

Such systems would combine payment infrastructure, AI-driven workflow coordination, treasury optimization, identity and trust frameworks, and interoperability across financial networks to enable autonomous transactions without removing institutional oversight.

UOB said the goal was to ensure that financial institutions could trace what an AI agent had done, why it was authorized to act and where accountability lay.

Several building blocks were already emerging, including bounded mandates, portable identity frameworks, continuous authorization models, cryptographic verification and trusted interoperability frameworks.

Stronger audit trails, human oversight and industry collaboration would also be essential to developing autonomous financial systems that could be deployed responsibly at scale.

The report said institutions that succeeded would not necessarily be those with the most autonomous systems, but those that made AI-driven financial activity trustworthy, controllable and accountable.

If these conditions were met, bounded autonomous finance could become a foundational component of the future financial system.

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