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The Focus

 

Agentic AI has reached an inflection point that has little to do with model capability and everything to do with structure.

 

Across fintech, agents are getting better at reasoning, coordinating tasks, and acting with limited human intervention. Internally, many firms already rely on them to manage workflows that once required entire teams. The ambition for 2026 is clear: bring those agents closer to customers, where they can operate across payments, accounts, compliance, and decision-making in real time.

 

Yet the constraint holding this vision back is not intelligence. It is language.

 

Financial systems still speak in incompatible dialects. Each platform defines transactions, identities, risk signals, and permissions differently. That fragmentation was tolerable when software followed rigid rules and narrow scopes. It becomes a liability when agents are expected to observe context, move across systems, and act autonomously.

 

In that environment, agentic AI does not fail loudly. It fails quietly. It hesitates. It simplifies. It works only where boundaries are clearly drawn, reinforcing the same silos the technology was supposed to dissolve.

 

This is why open standards are resurfacing, not as an ideological argument, but as a practical one. Agentic AI exposes the cost of proprietary plumbing in a way previous generations of software never did. The more capable agents become, the more visible the seams between systems appear.

 

There is a familiar parallel here. Open banking struggled not because its logic was flawed, but because incentives were misaligned and the burden of interoperability fell unevenly. Agentic AI shifts that equation. When agents can reduce integration friction rather than add to it, openness becomes commercially attractive, not merely regulatory.

 

The deeper implication is structural. The next phase of fintech competition may hinge less on who builds the smartest agent and more on who helps define the shared rails those agents can move across. Differentiation will still matter, but it will live in judgment, experience, and trust rather than in closed interfaces.

 

This is a quieter kind of transition, but a decisive one. If agentic AI is meant to operate across the financial lives of individuals and businesses, the industry must decide whether it wants intelligence confined by walls or amplified by shared foundations.

 

The reporting linked below explores this question from inside the systems being built today.

 

Read the full analysis:

Open Standards Will Unlock Agentic AI's Next Breakthrough in Fintech - by Manik Surtani, Head of Open Source at Block

 

 

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