I recently wrote about Amazon turning away Meta’s agent, and then about Walmart letting it in under their terms. Last month, the same question reached a bank, JPMorgan. Their response to agents at their door is instructive because of the unique position that financial institutions hold in the economy.
JPMorgan stops outside agents from logging into customer accounts. If it catches a third party trying to get in with a customer’s credentials, it refuses. Jamie Dimon (CEO, JPM) kept it simple on the earnings call: you don’t want rogue agents. Letting any agent through, he said, was too much risk for the customer and for the firm, and the bank was building its own tools instead. Granting an agent use of your password is where agentic banking breaks down.
He’s right about the password. A shared login says nothing about what the holder may do, for how long, or on whose say-so. Walmart’s terms at least state that an agent’s act inside granted permissions counts as the customer’s own. A password states nothing, and when the account holds someone’s savings, refusing that arrangement is a fundamental fiduciary responsibility of financial institutions.
Then the bank’s spokesperson added a line that most of the coverage skipped. JPMorgan supports customer-authorized data sharing through open banking providers. That door has been there for years.
Open banking is the one corner of American consumer finance where the law already treats the customer’s data as the customer’s, to be routed on the customer’s instruction to a third party of the customer’s choosing. The rule itself is still being challenged in courts, so there’s some possibility for change. The principle under it has been in statute since 2010, and companies like Plaid have spent a decade building the plumbing. It is the nearest thing this country has to a rail that runs from the customer outward.
So the largest bank in the country refused the agent that logged in as if it were the customer, then named as acceptable a channel where the customer grants scoped, revocable permission under terms the customer can set. Walmart wrote the merchant’s side of the agent contract. The bank has essentially established where the customer’s side could come from.
JPMorgan’s approach isn’t complete. Open banking, as it stands, moves data, not instructions. An agent can read a balance through it; it cannot move money. And the big banks have fought the rule at every step, but it is becoming the norm for how financial data can be accessed across systems.
In Europe, a smaller bank has taken a different approach. Germany’s Scalable Capital opened its platform to ChatGPT, Claude and Grok in August. A customer can ask any of them to analyze a portfolio and place a trade, so long as the customer approves each trade and the agent can neither pay out nor withdraw. That is an agent working inside a bank under terms, today. The rules are still being written, worldwide, for agentic financial interactions. This will be a critical area to follow in the coming months.
In commerce, Amazon and Walmart took different approaches. The country’s largest bank has said it will allow agents to engage only through an established rail with precedent. Neither adequately addresses the customer’s right as a first party, nor the subsequent right to assert terms. Stay tuned…