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As stablecoins, real-time payment networks and artificial intelligence converge, financial infrastructure providers are confronting the fact that competitive questions are now becoming architectural ones.
But building a system in which software can initiate transactions across borders, currencies and banking networks, without compromising the controls that make those transactions trustworthy, is something easier said than done.
It is a paradox that Karen Webster, CEO of PYMNTS, put directly to Sinclair Toffa, co-founder and CEO at Mural, in a recent conversation.
“Embedding capabilities into software and creating interoperability between buyers and sellers, traders, on opposite ends of a transaction is something that the FinTech ecosystem and even legacy players have been tackling for decades,” Webster said. “So, what’s new?”
“Agents are the new interface,” Toffa said, comparing their emergence to the transition from desktop computing to mobile applications and predicting that AI agents could initiate 5% of cross-border payment transactions within the next year.
“We need to develop new systems that are agent native and agent oriented,” he said.
To scale across financial services responsibly, AI agents will need dedicated financial accounts, granular permissions and transaction-level audit trails rather than unrestricted access to existing banking relationships. That makes Toffa’s 5% forecast an aggressive one, particularly given the industry’s unresolved questions around authorization, liability and oversight.
A former Palantir engineer, Toffa said his firm is attempting to standardize the software objects that connect existing networks, allowing businesses to interact with fragmented financial systems through a common application programming interface by an architecture that incorporates compliance records, permissions and audit trails into the underlying financial software.
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