AI agents: Friend or foe?

Your marketing should embrace the AI agents that will be between you and your clients.

AI-generated summary

What’s new: Anne Boden argues in the FT that AI agents will step between banks and customers, and while JPMorganChase, Citi and Bank of America restrict outside agents, others such as NatWest experiment.
Why it matters: Letting or blocking AI agents is a brand and marketing decision, not only a security one, because customers will take their agents to firms that let them in, and corporate buyers will follow.
What to do about it: Find out which agent-blocking rules are live, publish your position, make terms consistent and machine-readable, document how clients' agents can connect, then test what public agents say about you and measure blocked traffic.

Read on to learn why:

① Banking’s next phase won’t involve a better app but rather opening up to AI.

② AI agents want clear terms, consistent pricing and trust they can verify.

③ After reputational damage, the key question is what will change?

④ A product feature with a clear benefit trumps a lofty vision no one else can see.

⑤ Your brand carries connotations, both good and bad, you may not be aware of.

⑥ Once you’ve identified demand, you should help your prospects voice it.

⑦ There are reasons to be positive about AI.

🥇 But first, have you ever wanted a comprehensive, searchable, filterable list of all the events and media titles that matter if you’re marketing to B2B financial services or fintech buyers? Well, I built one for you >

What's new

Anne Boden, founder and former chief executive of Starling Bank, took to the FT’s opinion pages this week to argue that the battle over the AI-led future of banking has begun.

Source: The Financial Times, 14 October 2026

① According to Boden, the next phase of banking won’t involve a better bank on your phone, or even an app. “A very able AI agent is almost certain to step into the gap” between banks and their customers, she writes. Customers are taking to agents quickly: Meta’s Muse passed 6.6 million downloads within two weeks of launch. She wants banks, regulators and companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic around one table.

“The next phase in the development of banking won’t involve putting a better bank on your phone and won’t even involve an app. A very able AI agent is almost certain to step into the gap between banks and their customers, making all this irrelevant.” - Anne Boden

Most banks are not waiting for the invitation to the table. Just this week, JPMorganChase said it won’t let outside agents act inside its systems and warned customers that sharing credentials with agents may leave them responsible for misuse. Citi and Bank of America have followed. Bank of America wants liability rules settled first, while Citi still allows limited read-only access through certain open-banking providers. The Financial Times puts the stakes at $1.6tn of non-interest-bearing deposits across JPMorganChase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo; paying 3% on that would cost around $47bn a year.

Others are experimenting. NatWest worked with Nvidia so its new voice spending tool understands regional accents, and says it now mishears 20% fewer words. Bank of America, BBVA, Synchrony and Wells Fargo have joined the Personal Agent Protocol, a framework for setting parameters on what agents can do. MarTech reports on how fast retail split: Amazon warned Muse users, while PayPal and Shopify enabled it within days. Risk.net cautions that banks’ claims about their own AI adoption deserve a pinch of salt.

Why it matters

Every one of these stories is ultimately about technical access for AI agents, and I’d argue that is as much a brand or marketing decision as it is a security or fraud team one. MarTech notes that in retail, a block often starts as a bot-management rule, and marketing only finds out when conversion drops. B2B marketers need to get ahead of that.

The case for blocking is real. Boden points out that bank fraud controls are built around human behaviour, and Bank of America says liability is unresolved. But a block only protects the relationship if the customer gives up on the agent. MarTech’s retail evidence says they don’t: they take the agent, and everything it knows about them, to a retailer that lets it in. Blocking outsiders while piloting your own agent, as JPMorganChase is doing with Smart Cash, is defensible but it doesn’t feel right long-term.

② These stories are about retail, but what starts in consumer markets reaches business markets soon after, because the people who buy for firms are the people downloading these agents. Boden notes that an agent running even a small business could make thousands of transactions across merchants and currencies. Your next corporate client may shortlist you without anyone visiting your website, then expect their agent to onboard, query and transact with your product without a phone call. An agent doesn’t respond to a logo or your smart merch. It wants clear terms, consistent pricing and trust it can verify.

What to do about it

Take action

Find out who has already decided. Ask security and fraud teams which agent-blocking rules are live today and what they cost in lost enquiries. Marketing belongs in that conversation.
Publish your position. Say what agents may see, what they may do and how a customer authorises them. Citi’s read-only access and the Personal Agent Protocol both show a middle path. Open, with gates, beats blocked.
Make your terms machine-legible. Rates, fees, eligibility and contract terms should be identical across every channel and published as structured data. MarTech’s retail example is an apparel brand with three different returns policies losing to a rival with one. A corporate buyer’s agent comparing providers will notice inconsistency just as quickly.
Make your product easy for clients’ agents. Document how an agent can connect, authenticate with a client’s permission, and complete routine tasks such as onboarding, reporting and payments. If your best client’s agent can’t use you, a competitor’s will be easier.
Test it, then measure it. Ask a public agent to shortlist providers in your market and read what it says about you. Then tag agent traffic, including what you turn away, so the cost of a block is visible.

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Top stories

The other articles that are worthy of your time this week.

FINANCIAL SERVICES

Bank of America profits drop 17% after $1.2bn money laundering fine

③ After reputational damage, the key question is what will change?

Bank of America’s third-quarter profit fell 17 per cent to $6.9bn after a $1.2bn regulatory fine. The United States Treasury called the bank’s money laundering and sanctions failures “egregious and continued”, saying it failed to report more than $5bn of suspicious transactions. A second consent order followed, on top of one imposed in 2024. Shares fell more than 8 per cent in morning trading, although revenue also missed analysts’ expectations.

Marketing can’t undo a headline like this and shouldn’t try. Any attempt to spin “egregious and continued” would be read as more of the same. What communications can shape is the next story: how the bank is changing to prevent recurrence. Bank of America’s response here feels like it’s aimed at investors rather than clients. It deals in inputs: thousands of staff on remediation, costs already in the expense base. That answers an analyst, not a prospective client.

Settle in advance, with Legal and Compliance, which measurable evidence of remediation you are able to share and how often, so that the answer to “what has changed?” exists before the question arrives. Then brief client-facing teams before the news breaks, because relationship managers hear it from clients within hours.

FINTECH

Visa takes stablecoin-powered money movement from pilots to production

④ A product feature with a clear benefit trumps a lofty vision no one else can see.

Visa Direct’s stablecoin prefunding has moved from pilot to commercial deployment, with payments infrastructure provider Inyo Global as the first enabler. Businesses on Inyo’s platform can now prefund cross-border payouts with USD Coin in near real time, rather than relying solely on traditional funding windows, across more than 180 countries. Vira Platonova, Global Head of Visa Direct, said “the next chapter for stablecoins is adoption”.

I agree, Vira. Adoption is, indeed, the proof of the pudding. So, as you read this story, bear in mind it’s a Visa press release, with one processor, one use case and no volumes. But the choice of use case is the lesson. Visa hasn’t pitched stablecoins as the future of money; it has pitched them as a way to fund payouts at any hour. A buyer can picture that, test it and say yes to it, which is more than most digital-asset messaging allows. In regulated markets, a claim narrow enough to be believed beats a vision no one can follow.

Pick the one task your new product changes for a client and lead with it; the bigger vision can follow once someone has bought the task. Then check your proof. If you can name a live client, say so first. If all you have is a pilot, call it a pilot.

MEDIA & MARKETING

UK government courted UBS over London HQ move

⑤ Your brand carries connotations, both good and bad, you may not be aware of.

Source: The Financial Times, 16 October 2026

While she was chancellor, Rachel Reeves pitched London to UBS chair Colm Kelleher as a new home for the bank’s legal headquarters and stock market listing, most recently earlier this year. It follows Swiss lawmakers pressing ahead with capital rules that UBS says would force it to hold about $16bn more. UBS says it wants to stay in Switzerland.

A country in your brand is an asset or a liability depending on what it signals. Switzerland says discretion, stability and safe hands, which is worth real money in wealth management. I can’t imagine UBS would actually move; the association with Switzerland is too valuable to them. Then there is HSBC. How many people know what the H and the S stand for? Not many, after the bank spent years as ‘the world’s local bank’. Whether by design or not, it kept its Hong Kong and Shanghai roots, and any association with the Chinese Communist Party, in the background. The ideal brand as ever is Apple: no country in its name, yet nobody doubts where it comes from. Cupertino says innovation, optimism, and ideas that travel.

It’s worth checking your brand for connotations you may not even be aware of. List every place-based cue: name, headquarters, founders, regulator, language, imagery. Is Bank of America more American than JPMorganChase? Ask clients, not colleagues, what each one makes them assume. Then lean into the cues that build trust, and dilute or distance yourself from those that raise doubts.

WILDCARD

Rats in London over robotaxis in San Francisco

⑥ Once you’ve identified demand, you should help your prospects voice it.

Marit Rodevand. Source: City AM, 13 October 2026

Marit Rodevand, founder and CEO of financial crime prevention start-up Strise, explains in City AM this week why she built in London (where during her first few days she watched a new rat neighbour scurry into a drainpipe) rather than San Francisco (“where cafes are running more Claude prompts than most banks”). She held six-month visa options for both.

The rats that matter in Rodevand’s piece are the financial criminals. Her reason for choosing London came down to demand: £325bn of dirty money flows through the UK every year, according to the Finance Innovation Lab, and she says the compliance chiefs, regulators and law enforcement she meets want to tackle it, while she sees less appetite in the US. She’s started a podcast to prove it, with buyers and regulators discussing the problem in their own words.

It’s a good reminder of a marketing fundamental: lead with your buyer's problem, not your product. Ask your CMO which market, regulator or sector most wants the problem you solve fixed, and whether your content says so before it mentions what you sell. Then build a marketing channel where clients do the talking, such as a podcast, roundtables or a published interview series.

Off cuts

The stories that almost made this week’s newsletter.

The last word

⑦ Sarah Breeden, deputy governor for financial stability at the Bank of England, on AI’s role in economic growth:

Sarah Breeden. Source: City AM, 12 October 2026

“We should be optimists about AI. [It] is a general purpose technology and innovation has got to be our best pathway at getting growth.”

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Wishing you an inquisitive week,

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