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Currently, many banks are blocking Muse and similar agents from accessing customer accounts or moving money without customer authentication by the bank. Their statements cite the security and liability issues above. In many media reports, though, their motivation is alleged to be the last two issues — fear of having to pay more for deposits or fear of a run.

From: Login | CMS | Arizent.

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Technology companies are selling agents as personalized assistants for billions of people — always-on, compliant entities that will schedule meetings, throw parties, and purchase things for human users. So far, agents and shopping seem to go hand in hand; Meta said in its Q3 earnings call this month that it was the most common use case for Muse so far, and that purchases were over $200 on average. Muse has been a hit for Meta and could signal a turning point for AI agents: The company said 10 million people in the US had downloaded the app in 40 days.

From: The RealReal won’t let AI agents hog designer clothing | The Verge.

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Many of the most socially valuable uses of crawling require anonymity. Revealing a crawler’s identity and purposes can change the very nature of the information that is collected; if the subject of the study knows it is being observed and by whom, its behavior will change. That is the point of studying it anonymously.

From: Breaking the Open Web Won’t Stop the Bad Bots | TechPolicy.Press.

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Late last month, more than 300 representatives from major media outlets were on Capitol Hill to advocate for the Stealth Bot Prohibition Act. They came with a legitimate grievance. Newsrooms are being hit by a surge of automated traffic, mostly from AI developers. AI developers extract enormous volumes of online content and then potentially deprive website owners of referral traffic and ad revenue with generative AI features and chatbots trained on that content. It is a real problem that deserves a real solution. But this bill doesn’t directly target the harms caused by abusive crawling. Instead, it would force anyone accessing a website automatically to identify themselves and their purposes for collecting public information. Rather than protect journalists, the bill threatens a basic tool they, and many others, rely on to gather information online.

From: Breaking the Open Web Won’t Stop the Bad Bots | TechPolicy.Press.

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Xero has launched a connected app for Google Gemini, enabling small businesses, accountants and bookkeepers to query live financial data from within the Gemini interface. The integration, announced on 14 October 2026 from Wellington, allows users to retrieve profit and loss statements, check cash positions, surface overdue invoices and generate visual reports through conversational prompts, without leaving the Gemini environment.

Diya Jolly, president of product and technology at Xero
The capability is powered by JAX, Xero’s agentic platform, which maintains a secure, continuously synchronised link between a user’s Xero instance and the Gemini session. Xero confirmed that financial data shared between platforms is used solely within the active session and is not used to train Google’s models, a data governance commitment the company is describing as foundational to the integration.

From: Xero Connects Live Financial Data to Google Gemini for SMBs | The Fintech Times.

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A group of European payments businesses have joined forces to launch a new industry body, the Local Payments Council for Agentic Commerce, aimed at collaboratively developing an industry standard for agentic commerce.

The founding members of the council include PPRO, a UK-based paytech; BLIK, a Polish mobile payment system; Bancontact, a Belgian paytech; European Payments Initiative (EPI), a Belgium-headquartered joint initiative behind the pan-European payment system Wero; and DIAS, the national payment clearing house in Greece.

The Local Payments Council for Agentic Commerce will analyse local payment systems that are in place across Europe and how they can be integrated with AI agents responsibly.

From: European payments players launch new agentic commerce council.

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The European Payments Council (EPC) has launched Strong Customer Authentication Acceptance Rulebook and Liability Framework for EU Digital Identity Wallet Transactions (SCARLET), an initiative to establish common rules for using EU Digital Identity Wallets in payment authentication. Alongside technical interoperability, the rulebook is intended to clarify contractual responsibilities and the allocation of liability among participating payment service providers and wallet providers. The framework will support the consistent acceptance of EU Digital Identity Wallets by payment service providers (PSPs) when customers choose to use them for strong customer authentication. In the payments sector, the wallets are expected to provide an alternative way for customers to authenticate themselves when accessing accounts or initiating electronic payments.

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But robots shopping for things instead of humans has the potential to upend the balance of the web as we know it. For one, if humans stop visiting websites directly and instead access the web through chatbots, businesses become one step removed from their customers. Retailers — most notably Amazon — have recognized that reality could disrupt their bottom line, especially advertising revenue, and have blocked agents from shopping on their sites.

From: The RealReal won’t let AI agents hog designer clothing | The Verge.

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Amazon shoppers know that sponsored product ads are everywhere on the marketplace; however, an agent shopping for one specific product never sees these. Throw in the customer data that would disappear if agents did all the buying and you have a recipe for retailers like Amazon to wall off their sites.
“Any website that is financed by ads loses money if you send an AI agent,” Zoeller said. “They cost the same money to serve as a human, right? Traffic bandwidth, whatever it is. But they, at the same time, could also be a scraper for another service.”
Marketplaces like Amazon rely on people browsing, clicking ads and making impulse buys. For an independent brand, it doesn’t matter whether a human or a bot clicks “buy,” a sale is a sale.
That difference is why Meta has leaned heavily into formal partnerships with Shopify – which makes money off of subscriptions and merchant tech – rather than trying to force its way into closed marketplaces, and why the commerce platform has opened itself up to other AI agents as well.

From: As Amazon Blocks Muse, Could Industry Fragmentation Derail Agentic Commerce?.

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An influx of AI agents accessing consumer platforms could also break or complicate even the most unexpected things shoppers take for granted, like the reserve system of a used clothing website. There is, of course, a realistic limit to how long a person is willing to spend adding and re-adding designer clothing to their shopping cart if they’re indecisive. An agent in contrast does not care. It is perhaps precisely the type of busywork a fashion-forward person might pay an actual personal assistant to do on their behalf. Now, a capability like this is at the fingertips of millions of consumers, and they are just beginning to learn how to take advantage of it. Retailers, too, are playing catch-up.

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You’ve probably heard of the “Three Body Problem”, the outstanding Chinese future fiction novel by Liu Cixin (or the perhaps the Netflix series based on it). The three body problem in the title is a real problem in physics: the motion of two bodies can be calculated with precision but adding a third body introduces unpredictable chaos. With the arrival of non-human financial services customers just around the corner, I think we are about to see similar chaos in the universe of retail financial services. We cannot predict the trajectory of products and services when we have not three bodies interacting, but three bots interacting: the bank bot, the regulator bot and (soon) the customer bot.

From: The ‘Three Body Problem’ In Fintech And The Unpredictable Impact Of AI.

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According to the research, which collated data from 2,000 US consumers earlier this year, found that 72% of consumers have used an AI assistant.

However, only 23% of participants trust generative AI (GenAI) to make payments on their behalf.

From: 72% of US consumers have used an AI assistant – Visa Trust Index.

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