Money20/20 exec says Wall Street's AI agents have an identity problem no one has solved

AI agents have started buying stocks, trading crypto and shopping online with real money. The financial industry still can't say who they answer to.

An AI agent is software that acts instead of answering. Give it a goal and access to an account, and it places trades, makes purchases and moves money around the clock, without asking first.

According to the executive running the payments industry's biggest conference, no one has solved the hardest problem this creates.

"We believe that identity is the fundamental challenge," Jessica Blue, executive vice president of Money20/20, told TheStreet Roundtable. "Before we can know whether we can fully trust the AI agents to initiate payments autonomously, we need to know who authorized them."

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Agents are already here

In May, Robinhood unveiled agentic trading and an agentic credit card. Customers can connect third-party AI tools that trade stocks on their behalf and shop with a virtual card, drawn from a separate account funded only with money the user sets aside.

The giants of traditional investing see it coming too. Vanguard has called agentic AI "the big unlock" for investors, because it lets individuals build complex trading strategies and have them run completely autonomously, 24/7.

Identity first

Blue argues that fraud and liability get the attention, but both depend on the identity question, and no one has found a good way to answer it yet.

"If an AI agent makes an unauthorized transaction, who's liable?" she said. "Is it the consumer? Is it the bank? Is it the technology provider? Is it the merchant?"

The card networks are starting with the same question. Visa's Trusted Agent Protocol, released in October 2025 with Cloudflare, uses cryptographic signatures to separate approved agents from malicious bots.

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But those tools verify the agent. They don't settle who pays when it's wrong.

Right now, the answer defaults to the customer. Robinhood's disclosures say it does not supervise or audit the agents customers connect, and that customers assume the risk for their agents' orders.

The rest of the industry isn't ready either. A Deloitte survey found only 21% of IT and business leaders say their organizations have a mature governance model for agentic AI.

Next stop, Las Vegas

Blue said identity is going to be "a huge theme at Money20/20," the payments industry's marquee event, and pointed to a session called "Know Your Agent," a play on the banking rule known as Know Your Customer.

Alex Blania, CEO and co-founder of Tools for Humanity, the company behind Sam Altman's World ID identity project, will speak Sunday night about proving human identity in an AI world.

Money20/20 USA runs Oct. 18-21 at The Venetian in Las Vegas. For tickets and information, visit Money20/20 USA.