For two years the nicest way people told us Payman was a crazy idea was “trust between AI and money is hard, it’ll take time.” Last week 100+ bankers in Boulder voted us the Bankers Choice Award for our tech. Not a panel, not an analyst, the people who’d actually have to trust an agent with their customers’ money. The older you get, the less likely you are to get a trophy, and I didn’t realize that until our team got one. Our product and engineering teams, with Prashanth and Akash, spent those two years making this safe, reliable, token efficient, fast, and actually delightful all at once, which is a bit like walking barefoot across glass. Scott and Sanjay figured out the other half, the real pain we solve, how to stage it into a bank even when we don’t start with money movement, and how to sell into one. Trust is still built over time and through action, and an AI world doesn’t change that. It just means more people say it out loud once you’ve earned it. Agentic banking is here. We’re not just pioneering it anymore, we’re laying the foundation.

Today we're launching @PaymanAI's AI Agents, built for the age of agentic banking. Every bank faces a quiet threat: the big AI companies are getting between you and your customers. The questions that used to come to your bank now go to ChatGPT. 200M+ people ask ChatGPT financial questions. 55% of US consumers use AI for money decisions, up from about 10% last year. Every one of those is a relationship your bank used to own. Payman brings it back in-house. Our agents answer everyday money questions in your bank's context, serve retail and commercial, and even move money seamlessly. We're already in production with banks nationwide, moving tens of thousands for their customers in just months, and that number grows every day. Ready to bring your customers back in-house? Watch the video, then head to paymanai.com

Today I'm excited to share @SigilumID! This is @PaymanAI's solution for Auditable Identity for AI Agents. (think One Password-ish but for AI Agents) I recorded a quick walkthrough showing how it all works (video below). This answers three pains we've seen within Financial Services (Banking) AI Agents we've built and @openclaw AI Agents we deploy. Security, Auditability, and Control. 1. Security Making sure keys are secure and not just freely given to an AI Agent is a big deal. When working with money, you can't just expose these or skip putting controls in place. Sigilum provides a local gateway that prevents access to keys by the AI Agent without explicit authorization from a person. We provide namespaces through the service so you always know who authorized what key, for what service, to which agent. 2. Auditability If I could hit on the importance of this 100 times I would. It comes up in every financial services conversation. Sigilum provides you with the answer to "Who authorized this AI Agent to act on my behalf?" Audit logs trace back to the person, the service, and the AI Agent. With more audit logs being built through our managed service, this will be the key source for determining how an AI Agent is behaving on your behalf. This is needed for agents from OpenClaw, and especially for banking/money movement. 3. Control Revoke keys, limit access, grant authorization. All seemingly simple things, but complex to implement and make elegant. These controls dictate what the AI Agent can or cannot do. Sigilum allows you to do all of this through the managed Dashboard. We've made Sigilum open source and encourage others to contribute and keep building on the gateway. It's been a source of a lot of visibility and productization of AI Agents for us. We'll keep contributing and adding to it. Link in comments. If you want to try it out, we do have a managed service that makes it easy to spin up. Go to Sigilum.id to sign up. Note: even though we've been pushing 100+ commits a day to get this out to folks, there are still some noticeable areas for improvement we're working on, which should get resolved soon (by us or you!): - Deeper audit trails - More providers (currently supports all OpenClaw providers) - Deeper scanning of existing keys your agent is hiding from you (we'll find them) - OpenClaw gateway persistence - Auto-purging keys - And more... If you want to contribute or have feedback, please DM or go to the GH. Happy building!

Hidden in OpenAI’s Instant Checkout launch is a glimpse of the future. The Agentic Commerce Protocol, open-sourced with Stripe, shows where this is heading: a race to define how AI agents move money. Agents won’t just answer. They’ll send, spend, fund, subscribe, and transact on our behalf. The future is agentic money movement.

Money decisions keep getting compressed by technology. Software turned billions of human decisions into millions of lines of code. Crypto reduced those millions to thousands of lines of smart contract code. AI reduces those thousands to a single LLM call. Each step hasn’t just made finance simpler, it’s made it more powerful. What once took entire systems of people and software now takes a single expression of intent.

For most of banking history, money didn’t move unless a human told it to. People walked into branches, signed slips, made phone calls. Money was static until someone acted on it. Even when digital banking emerged, first through websites and later through apps, the underlying structure remained the same: a person initiates, the system responds. Then came basic automation. Things like scheduled transfers, low-balance alerts, or recurring payments gave the illusion of intelligence. But these were still rigid. The user defined the rules, and the system followed them exactly. There was no real understanding, no flexibility, no context. Now something deeper is shifting. AI is changing how we relate to decision-making in every part of our lives. People are no longer content to micromanage their money. They're starting to speak in intent. They're beginning to expect systems to not just follow instructions, but to act on their behalf in ways that make sense. You can hear it in how people are starting to describe what they want: "Move $500 to savings if I stayed under budget this month." "Pay the rent, but only after my paycheck lands." "Send my kid $100 if their debit card drops below $50." These aren’t tasks. They’re expectations. And they reveal a mindset that’s shifting away from control toward coordination. Yet our financial infrastructure wasn’t built for this. Not just technologically, but philosophically. Core systems are built for determinism. APIs expect direct instructions. Fraud systems are trained to detect abnormalities in user behavior, not autonomous agent actions. Compliance systems don’t capture reasons. They capture events. In response, banks keep adding layers. More dashboards. More approval flows. More “smart” rules. But most of it still relies on the same assumption: that a person, not a system, is the final actor. So we keep asking users to do the heavy lifting. Even when the machine could handle it better. It’s time to ask whether this is the best we can do. Is the future of banking just a better app, or is it something different entirely? Because at some point, the bottleneck is no longer the system. It’s us. The truth is that people have already started handing off control in other parts of life. They let navigation reroute them in real time. They let their phones organize their calendars. They rely on software to remind them, prompt them, nudge them forward. Not because they’re lazy, but because they’re trying to focus on what actually matters. Delegation is not a loss of agency. It’s a refinement of it. And so the real question is not whether people will give up control over their money. The question is who they will trust to act in their place, and under what conditions. That’s where things get complicated. Because money is not just a tool. It’s loaded with emotion, memory, habit, and fear. It represents security, responsibility, self-worth, identity. If we want to build systems that can act on a person’s behalf, we have to do more than move money. We have to encode boundaries. We have to understand context. We have to know the quiet logic behind decisions people don’t even say out loud. "Only pay the card if I have enough left for groceries." "Don’t pull from savings unless it’s really important." "Tell me before you do something that might stress me out." These are not financial commands. They are expressions of trust. And if we want systems to handle them, we need to build infrastructure that reflects the complexity of human priorities. Not smarter interfaces. Smarter intent engines. Not faster APIs. Better reasoning frameworks. Not open access. Layered, permissioned autonomy. Because when people feel understood, they don’t just let go. They lean in. They start to see the system not as a set of tools, but as a partner. And when that happens, banking doesn’t need to be loud, or present, or persistent. It just works. You didn’t tap anything. You didn’t check your balance. You didn’t move money around in a panic on Sunday night. The right thing happened, at the right time, with your values baked in. That’s not a product feature. That’s a new relationship between people and money. It doesn’t need a dashboard. It needs infrastructure that can listen, interpret, and act—with care, security, and context. That’s the world we’re moving toward. Slowly, then suddenly. And when we get there, we won’t ask whether people are ready to give up control. We’ll wonder why we ever thought they wanted to hold on to it in the first place.

You won’t be shopping in 5 years. Your AI agent will. It’ll find the deal, check out, follow your rules. Visa just built the rails: 4.8B cards, $40B fraud stopped, now securing machines that spend for you. The question isn’t if—it’s are you ready?🧵

AI Agents should be paying my Property Taxes Contractor Payments Speeding Tickets Investment Manager Other AI Agents Delivery Orders House Payments Car Payments Even everything that auto pay does should be replaced by AI Agents paying. Auto pay is dumb, AI isn't.

We just launched the Payman Dev Challenge. No boring fintech. No theoretical AI. Just real devs building AI agents that move actual money. $500 for top teams, $100 for all who ship. 🧵This is where AI + finance gets real.