The news: JPMorganChase will not let outside AI agents access customer account information, citing trust and security risks, per JPMorganChase’s earnings call. 

Executives focused on the risks of outside agents. “It’s important that customers understand that if they give up their credentials to the agent and the agent does something that they don’t want, that’s going to be on them, and that’s sort of not an ideal state of things,” CFO Jeremy Barnum said.

However, the bank is piloting Smart Cash, an internal agent that can do things like move funds from checking accounts into products with better yields.

How we got here: Major players on both sides of the commerce ecosystem are drawing battle lines for outside AI agent access—Amazon, for example, blocked Meta’s Muse agents from shopping on its site.

Both payment providers and retailers have cited privacy and security concerns around giving outside agents access to first-party consumer data. But just as much, they want to own the consumer relationship and experience.

If JPMorganChase lets an outside agent run a consumer’s financial life, the bank loses the primary relationship with the consumer. That hurts its brand power and other revenue streams, like advertising opportunities.

Implications for payment providers: Emerging technologies, especially in financial services, have to be carefully vetted and tested for security, privacy, and compliance before being released to the public. 

Payment providers can distinguish themselves from competitors by taking an early lead in defining how and what trust will look like under an agentic paradigm. American Express could offer a blueprint of what that looks like: It launched the Intent Intelligence Framework on Tuesday, which helps issuers track the lifecycle of a transaction and manage risk. It also laid out agentic purchase protection guarantees for when agents go awry.

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