As AI agents begin making purchases for customers, the financial crime controls built around human behaviour may be looking in the wrong place. According to Vivox AI, a transaction can sit comfortably within every spending limit and still stem from a manipulated decision made long before checkout.

Vivox AI’s analysis draws on a panel held at QUBE Events’ sixth Financial Innovation Forum: Payments & RegTech. Bank of London deputy director of financial crime Zainab Shode moderated the session. She was joined by Manish Kumar, former head of payment acceptance products at Starling Bank; Mastercard vice president of product management Priyanshi Mathur; PXP group CEO Kamran Hedjri; and CGI vice president of payments solutions Ainsley Ward.

Consider a simple instruction to book a hotel. An agent might pick a convincing fake website and pay a fraudulent merchant with the customer’s full authority. In a more extreme scenario, it could cancel another guest’s booking to secure the room. In both cases, Vivox AI notes, the final payment reveals only part of the story.

The panel framed consent as a set of specific, checkable permissions rather than a single approval. Payment providers need to know how much an agent may spend, which merchants or categories it may use, when its authority expires and how a customer can amend or withdraw it. These rules will vary between cards, digital wallets and account-to-account transfers, each of which handles authorisation, disputes and liability differently.

Identity also becomes more complex. Firms must confirm not only who the customer is, but which agent is acting and whether it is the one the customer authorised.

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