Know Your Customer, Know Your Agent, part 1: the principal · October 6, 2026 · John Beckwith, Cooper Beckwith, LLC
An AI agent can open a session at your institution with your customer's credentials, read the account, and move money, and to your systems it looks like the customer. In 2012 HSBC paid $1.92 billion for knowing its counterparty and not the principals behind the counterparty's traffic. The agent at your window opens the same gap.
This paper, the first of four, sets Know Your Agent on top of Know Your Customer and names the four parties behind every agent-initiated transaction: the principal, the operator, the agent instance, and the developer. It traces the Know Your Agent layer the card networks, Google, and a Singapore regulator built in sixteen months, explains why the first expectations will come from state examiners, core providers, and network rules ahead of any federal rule, and opens with ten things an institution can do now, each fitting on one page of a board packet.
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