Open Finance risk: Seven things happened in October that you need to know about

October was the month AI agents and bank accounts collided in public. Five of the largest US and Canadian banks are now blocking outside agents, regulators are still working out who is liable, and the same question surfaces in every story: who is accredited, who is watching their risk, and who pays when something goes wrong.

US banks block AI agents and push the liability onto customers

On JPMorgan’s earnings call, chief executive officer Jamie Dimon said the bank won’t let outside AI agents act inside customer accounts, warning customers who use them of a “liability transfer”. Within days, Bank of America, Citi and Schwab drew the same line, while Starling founder Anne Boden argued banks should welcome authorised agents and agree the rules together. Then Axios reported banks finding unauthorised agents inside customer accounts, mostly logging in with customers’ own passwords. The Comptroller of the Currency would not say who covers the loss, and Wells Fargo’s new terms treat anything an agent does as authorised by the customer. By the end of the month, five major US banks were blocking external agents outright. Open Banking has been here before: screen scraping ended when banks and intermediaries agreed on application programming interfaces (APIs) with proper authentication, one agreement at a time.

The agent you approved may not be the one doing the work

Reuters reported that Meta routed some Muse agent calls to human contractors without clearly telling users, and one made a racist remark while negotiating a customer’s bill. Know Your Agent frameworks accredit software, not an undisclosed person who takes over halfway through. Decagon’s support agents, live at Square, Affirm and Chime, can now reuse one bank connection for weeks without a fresh login, backed by a System and Organization Controls 2 (SOC 2) certification that is a point-in-time check, not continuous oversight. And the Financial Data Exchange (FDX) and APIContext recently said API compliance is moving from annual testing to continuous verification, because a working financial app can now be built in about 20 minutes. A valid certificate says little about who, or what, is operating behind it today.

Identity is largely solved – authority and liability are not

At a Chatham House Rule panel chaired by Invela, a regulator, a standards body, a bank and two government teams agreed that existing infrastructure can confirm an agent is genuine, but not that it has authority for a specific action, and nobody has settled who’s accountable for a rogue one. Fraudulent agents are already posing as customers in call centres. The Financial Conduct Authority’s (FCA) PRISM Taskforce, built with 33 industry participants, named the preconditions for agentic finance: interoperability, governance and accountability, which map directly onto accreditation, continuous risk monitoring and liability management.

Regulator Day: liability lands on banks

At Open Banking Expo’s Global Regulator Day, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) said Open Finance liability isn’t settled and will likely depend on the use case. Research from the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance found that, in practice, liability tends to land on the bank as the customer’s first port of call, whatever the rulebook says.

Pay by Bank: no agreement on who pays when it goes wrong

A Token.io and Open Banking Expo survey found UK businesses split six ways on who should cover a fraudulent Pay by Bank payment, and 18% weren’t sure. Nearly half of industry respondents want scheme rules similar to debit cards. Rules settle who pays in principle; applying them depends on knowing who was in the payment chain, and whether each party was in good standing at the time.

A new survey proves Open Finance can’t out-hire its own maths

Drata’s survey of 309 security leaders found only 13% of organisations assess all their third parties, and one analyst can complete fewer than 100 thorough reviews a year. Open Finance makes this harder: its third-party count grows with customer choice and regulation, not institutional decisions, so no amount of hiring closes the gap.

Scoops, spills and straight answers: the Smart Data Council

Four UK Smart Data Council members joined Louise Beaumont for an Open Banking Expo podcast. Big tech isn’t required to join Smart Data schemes the way incumbents are, the UK still lacks a general consumer data right, and the headline £70 billion value figure undersells the gains in underwriting and credit decisioning.

Listen to Louise Beaumont on The Engine Room podcast, recorded live at Open Banking Expo UK & Europe 2026, in the episode ‘Inside the UK Government’s Smart Data Council: Scoops, spills & straight answers’.

Louise Beaumont leads marketing, communications and design at Invela

Invela is the infrastructure layer that makes Open Finance trustworthy – accrediting who’s in the network, monitoring risk in real time, and ensuring liability lands in the right place. Open Finance, covered.