JPMorgan Chase's chief executive has made two things clear to customers who use AI agents. The bank will not let every outside agent act inside its systems, and anyone who gives an agent access to an account owns that decision. Wells Fargo's chief executive has taken a softer line: the bank will weigh each outside agent for the value it adds and the risk it brings.
Safety is the stated reason, and money is the other one
The safety worry is real. An agent that holds a customer's login can do anything the customer can do, and if thousands of badly built ones appear, some will go wrong. Shopping has already seen the same move: Amazon blocked Meta's Muse in September. Muse is the assistant Meta launched in the United States that books travel, buys things and negotiates bills. Amazon objected that it does not identify itself and appears to store customers' logins, and Meta denies that.
Money is the other reason. Suppose you tell an outside agent to keep your savings wherever they earn the most. Sooner or later it moves them to a rival bank. JPMorgan is testing its own tool, called Smart Cash, that moves customers' money between their accounts at the bank to earn more interest. So the agent that could carry your deposits away is kept out, and the one that keeps them in the building is being tested. Both things can be true. The safety reason is sincere, and it also happens to protect the bank's deposits.
Reading will stay open and acting will be gated
The 2025 deals with the data middlemen show where the toll goes. The fees were fractions of a cent per data pull, which sounds like nothing until you count the pulls. A person checks a balance a few times a week. An agent that works for you checks balances, bills and prices all day, so it makes far more requests than you ever did, and that volume is what made the middlemen expensive.
My expectation is that banks will keep the paid pipes that let an assistant read your accounts, and they will keep the power to pay or transfer for agents they have approved. Reading is cheap to price and hard to abuse. Moving money is where a mistake costs someone real money, and where a bank has the most to lose if the customer relationship moves to someone else's software.
What a shop owner would see
Take a shop owner who asks her assistant, every Friday, to pay the week's supplier invoices from the business account and put whatever is left in the best savings account. At a bank that has approved her assistant, it does all of it. At a bank that has not, the assistant can still read the invoices, check the balance and line up the payments, and she taps approve herself. If she pays twenty invoices a week and each takes two minutes by hand, that is about forty minutes. With the payments prepared for her it is closer to five. Most of the saving survives the gate. The last tap stays with her.
That last tap is worth keeping on purpose. Before you give an assistant the power to pay or move money, find out whether your bank has approved it. If it has not, assume the bank will treat everything the assistant does as your own decision, and keep the final approval yourself until the bank says otherwise.