India’s banks push a ‘Know Your Agent’ standard as AI agents start handling money

As AI agents move from simply answering questions to actually initiating financial transactions on India’s payment infrastructure, a coalition of Indian banking leaders is pushing for a new governance standard they’re calling “Know Your Agent” — explicitly modelled on the existing Know Your Customer rules that govern human account holders, but adapted for autonomous software.

The underlying problem is straightforward: existing financial identity and fraud-prevention frameworks were built around the assumption that a human is initiating each transaction. Once AI agents can act on a person’s behalf — potentially across multiple services, with varying levels of delegated authority — banks need some equivalent way to verify which agent is acting for whom, and what it’s actually authorised to do.

The push comes as India works through a parallel effort to let AI agents transact over its UPI payments network without requiring approval for every single transaction, making the identity and accountability questions “Know Your Agent” is meant to address considerably more urgent than they might otherwise be.