- Open Finance Is Moving to Action: agents can discover products, compare options, and initiate permitted transactions for customers across institutions.
- APIs Must Answer Four Questions: every interaction should establish who is acting, whose authority they use, what is permitted now, and what evidence remains.
- Delegated Authority Needs Limits: agent access should be purpose-bound, time-limited, and revocable, never an unrestricted copy of customer authority.
- Identity Is the Trust Layer: unified identity controls can govern agents alongside customers and partners without creating a separate identity silo.
How AI is Changing Open Finance
Agentic AI is shifting digital services from interfaces customers navigate to outcomes software can pursue on their behalf. In financial services, AI agents will increasingly discover products, assemble financial context, compare options and initiate permitted actions across institutions and platforms.
Open finance supplies the data access and application programming interface (API) connectivity these journeys need. Identity for agentic open banking supplies the trust layer that decides which agent is acting, whose authority it carries, and what it can do. Competitive advantage will depend on turning machine-speed access into secure, accountable customer value.
Why Open Finance is Entering a New Phase
In our view, Latin America may offer one of the world's largest open finance opportunities. Brazil has demonstrated ecosystem scale, while other regional markets still have room to convert regulated access into lending, payments, and distribution growth.
Banco Central do Brasil reports Brazil's open finance ecosystem connects 68 million accounts and handled R$1.16 billion in payments and transfers in July 2025 alone.1,2 Proven infrastructure, digital-payment adoption, and untapped regional demand could make Latin America a natural starting point for the next phase of open finance.
Other major markets are moving in the same direction through different models:
- In the U.K., the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) roadmap builds on approximately 17 million active open banking users.3 It connects broader data access with AI-enabled services and agentic payments. Open Banking Limited reports that monthly payments passed 40 million for the first time in May 2026, and cumulative API calls passed 100 billion.4
- In the European Union, the Commission's 2023 financial data access proposal would extend customer-controlled sharing beyond payment accounts through standardized interfaces.5
- The Middle East is building formal ecosystems through state-led programs. Saudi Arabia's framework combines business rules, API specifications, and testing.6 The Open Finance Regulation in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) establishes a mandatory, consent-based framework for cross-sector data sharing and transaction initiation.7
- In Asia-Pacific, Australia is resetting its Consumer Data Right toward high-value use cases, and non-bank lenders have recently been brought into the scheme.8 Thailand plans to begin personal deposit-data sharing in late 2026.9
- The U.S. remains more fragmented and commercially driven. Banks, aggregators, and fintech providers rely on data-sharing agreements and operating standards. These define who may access data, how they can use it, and who is accountable when something goes wrong.
Industry bodies matter here. The Financial Data Exchange (FDX) has defined five core principles for consumer-permissioned data sharing: control, access, transparency, traceability, and security.10 The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau says a court stayed its Personal Financial Data Rights compliance dates on October 29, 2025, and it is reconsidering the rule.11
In this market, secure, permissioned API access and a clear chain of accountability are commercial prerequisites. They matter more as customers increasingly act through partners, platforms, and AI agents. Over 114 million accounts use FDX-aligned APIs, and FDX launched an April 2026 AI agent initiative as questions about agent identification, consent delegation, and security arise in adjacent areas such as payments.12
What Changes When Open Finance Becomes Agentic
In open banking, a customer typically authorizes an application to access data or initiate a payment. Agentic AI adds an actor that may discover, recommend, prepare, or, in controlled circumstances, execute under delegated authority.
An agent powered by a large language model (LLM) and acting for the customer must therefore be treated as an authorized application. It needs a distinct identity, defined permissions, and a scope tied to the customer's intent.
The institution must also understand the full chain of actors. That chain includes the customer, the external AI agent, its operator, any partner application, and the financial service.
Unlike a conventional application following a predictable workflow, an LLM agent may act asynchronously and call multiple tools. It can also make requests that are individually permitted but collectively inappropriate.
The key question used to be "Can this application connect?" Now it is "Should this actor be allowed to perform this action, for this customer, for this purpose, at this moment?"
Why the Agentic API Economy Changes the Scale of Trust
Agentic AI changes how often and how independently financial APIs are called, as well as who calls them. Cloudflare says more than half of the dynamic traffic on its network is API-related, and much of it is automated.13
Meanwhile, Salesforce's Agentic Enterprise Index found that financial services generated 10% of total monthly Agentic Work Unit output among the Salesforce customers it tracks.14 The sector's output grew thirteenfold between February 2025 and April 2026.14
Across all industries in the index, the ratio of agent action calls to generated text grew at a compound monthly rate of 15%.14 Agent action calls are requests that trigger real-world digital actions. That growth indicates agents are moving beyond conversation into execution.
These measures cover broader API and agent activity rather than financial-data API calls specifically, but they signal the direction of travel. As agents retrieve balances, compare products, and initiate transactions, one customer goal can generate many machine-to-machine requests.
Volume is only part of the challenge. Salt Labs found that 99% of the API attack attempts it analyzed originated from authenticated sources.15
A valid credential, in other words, proves that an actor was allowed to connect. It cannot prove that every later request is appropriate, so every financial-data call needs a traceable chain of trust.
Why Traditional API Security Is No Longer Enough
Strong authentication and protected API connectivity remain essential, but they are only part of the trust model. An authenticated application is not the customer, and an agent should never inherit unrestricted customer authority.
Consider a customer who asks an agent to move spare cash into a higher-yield savings account. The agent might read balances across three accounts, compare rates at two providers, and initiate a transfer. Each step can be permitted on its own, yet the transfer carries far more risk than the balance check.
Consent given at setup may not prove that a specific action fits its current purpose or risk. This creates four questions every open finance interaction must answer continuously, because the answers can change from one action to the next. Institutions should ask:
- Who is acting?
- Whose authority are they using?
- What are they permitted to do now?
- What evidence will establish accountability afterward?
If identity, consent, API management, fraud controls, and audit evidence stay disconnected, those questions become difficult to answer. Closing APIs to agents would sacrifice the opportunity. The better path connects every access request to continuous identity, authority, and policy decisions.
What Identity Adds to Open Finance API Security
Identity provides the trust chain between market demand and institutional supply. Every participant, whether customer, business, partner, application, or AI agent, must be recognized in its role. An agent should be linked to its principal, while delegated authority remains purpose-bound, time-limited, and revocable.
Authorization must move closer to the action. Retrieving a balance should not require the same control as moving funds. Contextual policy can evaluate identity, mandate, resource, value, and risk before allowing, denying, or escalating a request.
Consequential activity may require stronger verification or human approval. Each material action should leave evidence connecting the principal, agent, consent, policy decision, and outcome. This is how institutions move from exposing APIs to enabling accountable financial action.
Securing and Governing Open Finance with Modern Identity
Modern identity can act as the trust and control layer for open finance. Its capabilities help institutions control who and what can reach financial APIs, under which authority, and within which policy boundaries.
Those capabilities include authenticating and federating participants, managing identities and relationships, and issuing and validating scoped tokens. It can also protect API traffic at the gateway, apply runtime authorization, incorporate risk signals, step up verification, revoke access, and retain evidence. Institutions can extend existing customer, workforce, and partner identity investments into open finance instead of building another silo.
For agentic use cases, Ping can give each AI agent a first-class identity, bind it to its principal, and constrain access to the delegated purpose. The same policy layer can protect APIs, tools, and agent-facing resources across projects and partners.
Where Trusted Open Finance Creates Business Value
The proposition is bigger than compliance. Trusted access can support faster credit decisions, cash-flow services for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), and financial management.3
Permissioned data supplies context, APIs make it usable, and identity connects actions to the right person, purpose, and authority. When those three work together, institutions can automate routine steps that customers currently complete by hand.
We expect faster onboarding and higher conversion without weakening customer control. Trusted identity also helps institutions keep the customer relationship, even when a partner platform or an agent starts the journey.
How Financial Institutions Should Prepare
Start with value, then connectivity. Identify the journeys where broader data or agentic execution clearly improves an outcome, such as an SME credit decision that draws on permissioned cash-flow data.
Next, map the actor and authority chain for each journey. Include the participants, APIs, data, permitted actions, and points requiring consent, stronger verification, or human approval. This makes your control requirements visible before the journey reaches production.
Finally, establish reusable identity and API-security controls. A common trust model can adapt across schemes while consistently governing identity, consent, authority, runtime policy, revocation, and evidence.
The Institutions That Can Account for Every Request Will Lead
Open finance is becoming the infrastructure through which financial products are discovered, compared, and acted upon. As AI agents join customers, applications, and partners in that ecosystem, leadership will belong to institutions that can account for every request.
A practical next step is to choose one agent-initiated payment journey and trace it end to end. If your teams cannot reconstruct who acted, under what mandate, and why the payment was allowed, that gap is where to invest first.
Institutions that close that gap early can move faster into embedded, partner-led, and agent-mediated finance. They can open new routes to distribution and growth while protecting customer value.
Frequently Asked Questions
- Banco Central do Brasil - Press Note on Open Finance
- Celcoin - Banco Central comemora 5 anos de Open Finance
- Financial Conduct Authority - Open Finance Roadmap
- Open Banking Limited - 1 Billion Payments and Counting for UK Open Banking
- European Commission - Framework for Financial Data Access
- Saudi Central Bank - Open Banking Program
- Central Bank of the UAE - Open Finance Regulation
- Australian Treasury - Keynote Address to Fintech Australia Intersekt 2026
- Bank of Thailand - Open Data
- Financial Data Exchange - FDX White Paper
- Consumer Financial Protection Bureau - Personal Financial Data Rights
- Financial Data Exchange - As AI Agents Get Involved in Financial Data Sharing, Leading Standards Body Launches Initiative to Stay Ahead
- Cloudflare - Radar 2025 Year in Review
- Salesforce - Agentic Enterprise Index Insights 2026
- Salt Security - As AI Agents Outpace Security, Most Organizations Face an Unsecured API Surge