Which is an interesting problem, what happens when the agent fucks up and the customer loses lots of money? Who is responsible?
If the official policy is "no agents", it shifts the blame.
Honestly, US banks and credit unions should get their heads out of their asses and learn from it. There's a _reason_ people connect banks to YNAB, Monarch Money and stuff like that, and a reason why they might want an AI agent. They need the info. They may also need to make automated transactions, something companies have access to, but the ordinary person does not.
My landlord wants Zelle. I cannot schedule payments on my credit union. It's not like I can update the app since it lives inside their systems. So I have to login monthly. I debated getting another bank account and giving it to Muse just for that purpose.
Banks in the US are a couple of decades behind, say, Brazilian banks. Instant transfers to another bank were a thing since the early 2000s. And for years now you can do it from anyone to anyone, no third party app required. To the dismay of Visa and Mastercard.
The point of getting the second bank account is to reduce the blast radius if the agent goes haywire, I suppose?
But then you'll have to manually top up that account every now and then, how does it solve your initial problem?
Like someone else up-thread, my experience moving back to the US from Europe, ~15 years ago, was like stepping back to the financial dark ages. It's a bit better now (Zelle, Plaid, Mint / Monarch - though I'm well-aware of the privacy downsides of those third-party platforms), but the industry isn't close to catching up with the fifteen-year-old state of the art, let alone, say, Indian or Brazilian micro-transaction networks.
Also, they remove the money when they mail the check… not when it gets cashed.
If they were sold a product that claimed to be safe, they could in turn sue whoever sold it to them. Jeep’s insurance wouldn’t pay someone I crashed into because of defect in my jeep, but I could in turn sue Jeep for my legal trouble.
> The indefensible extension is that banks aren’t liable for defrauded customers. That is a potential policy regime, chosen by the polity of many democratic nations. The United States is not one of those nations. Our citizens, through their elected representatives, made the considered choice that financial institutions would need to provide extraordinary levels of safety in electronic payments. In reliance upon that regime, the people of the United States transacted many trillions of dollars over payment rails, which was and is very lucrative for all considered.
...
> With a limited number of carveouts (e.g. wire transfers), Reg E is intentionally drafted to be future-proof against changes in how Americans transact. This is why, when banks argue that some new payments rail is exempt because it is “different,” the correct legal response is usually some variation of: doesn’t matter—that’s Reg E.
If a connected person breaks rules and loses money, it's someone else's fault.
I don't make the rules, I just break them.
Part of it is "human in the loop" for write actions, part of it is commercial banks are deathly terrified of agents being able to move deposits around rapidly to maximize yield, as those deposits are cheap cost of capital banks use to lend against. Historically, deposits of unsophisticated financial services consumers were sticky, and that assumption is breaking down. Agents can be consumer copilots towards information asymmetry in this context.
"computah, maximize rate of return, minimize interest expenses, manage cashflow, make no mistakes."
None of that has changed.