RSA CEO Greg Nelson says that most banks are unaware of how many “shadow agents” are touching existing business processes and systems.

Nelson says that a bank with 4,000 shadow agents today could become 20,000 in the next 12 months, heightening the need for governance and supervision.

Permissions can outlast an agent’s human owner, while overloaded approval queues can weaken meaningful review.

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For anyone who remembers carrying an RSA SecurID key fob to log in to work, the company’s role is familiar. For more than 40 years, RSA has helped organizations establish who belongs inside their systems. In fact, they more or less established that standard.

Now RSA Security CEO Greg Nelson is applying that experience to a different kind of user: the AI agent. The job is to establish which agents are operating, what they’re allowed to do and who is responsible for them, then match the oversight to the work.

That’s the transition Nelson described in a Monday Conversation with PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster. RSA is extending its work managing employee access to agents that he says can keep working even after the person who put it there has left.

Webster cited an unnamed midsize bank that told RSA that it had no agents. RSA found 4,000 operating inside it.

For Nelson, who became CEO in September 2025 after serving as president and chief business officer, that example fits a broader pattern.

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