The Information's TITV
00:10:37 · Akash Pasricha, Yueqi Yang
[00:10:37] S0: Okay. Now, about the smaller banks, Lead Bank, Cross River Bank? What's their approach here? [00:10:43] S2: So the smaller banks are working with FinTech providers to provide access to AI agents to use bank accounts or to use cards that are prepaid and with spending limits. So for example, Lead Bank works with Stripe and Stripe is one of the most important and dominant payment provider for a lot of popular AI agents, including Manus and Instinct. And Stripe is able to provide a single use virtual cards for agents with a spending limit so that they can go shopping for you. And these cards are issued by banking providers and Lead Bank is one of the providers. And some of these other banks, Column, for example, they work with a startup called Natural, which provides digital wallets for AI agents. And these wallets are essentially subledgered accounts under the name of the human users held at open at column. And that effectively means that the money held in the wallet for agents are actually FDIC insured money and account at the bank. [00:12:04] S0: So, if I'm hearing you correctly, I mean, it sounds like the smaller banks, they're not necessarily saying that the agents are not going to go rogue. They're just saying that if that happens, we're going to play in a much smaller sandbox of capital. Is that the idea?
00:12:04 · Akash Pasricha, Yueqi Yang
[00:12:04] S0: So, if I'm hearing you correctly, I mean, it sounds like the smaller banks, they're not necessarily saying that the agents are not going to go rogue. They're just saying that if that happens, we're going to play in a much smaller sandbox of capital. Is that the idea? [00:12:23] S2: That's exactly right. Like for a lot of these banks, they have spending limit, they have transaction limit imposed on either the card or the account for increased bank. For example, I talked to the owner of increased bank and he said the bank is planning to offer isolated bank accounts for agents, which means that the agent won't be able to touch the rest of the money owned by the human customer. So the intent for all of these setup is to isolate the exposure that the agent can create if they go rogue or they misspend your money so that the responsibility and the liability is limited. [00:13:08] S0: Doesn't exactly scream trust, in my opinion, of these tools, if you ask me.
00:13:08 · Akash Pasricha, Yueqi Yang, Paddy Srinivasan
[00:13:08] S0: Doesn't exactly scream trust, in my opinion, of these tools, if you ask me. [00:13:15] S2: Yes, but I think that the argument that these banks and some of these fintech startups make is that in the future, you will not be able to block agents from accessing your bank accounts in part because agents also have access to your email. So if you think about how you log into a bank account, you generally get a verification code that's sent to your email or your phone, and the agents can use that code too. So they think rather than just trying to block it, which you might actually fail, you should provide a controlled scoped access for agents so that they can at least be able to tap into your isolated separate bank account, do what they need to do, but then you have an auditable rail to see and track what exactly your agent was doing. [00:14:07] S0: Now, Yueqi, this is interesting because between the big banks and then the small banks, I mean, I don't want to call them a middle player here, but a separate player are the trading companies or trading brokerages like Robinhood, and we had the CFO on the show a couple days ago. We were talking about their AI agents that they're using. I mean, these trading brokerages, mean, they've taken a little bit more of a liberal approach here with letting Manus and these tools access some of these tools, right? [00:14:43] S2: So the brokerages, a [00:14:45] S3: lot
00:14:45 · Paddy Srinivasan, Yueqi Yang, Akash Pasricha
[00:14:45] S3: lot [00:14:45] S2: of them, Robinhood included, have launched their own AI agents that you can use within their platform. And I think the stock brokerages and crypto exchanges too are early movers because historically there's always been programmatic trading of stocks and crypto. You can... Even in the past, you can set, for example, price limit for when you want to buy a certain stock if the price dropped to a certain price. And so it's not too far away from how agents are trading stocks and making investments for you. And then I think some of these brokerages, they also set up isolated accounts, again, similar to the approach by banks, which means that the agency is only able to manage and handle a certain amount of money, probably not all of your money in your brokerage account. [00:15:41] S0: It sounds like when parents set up little small $1,000 or $100 trading funds for their kids, they're like, Here, play with this, see what you can do with it, and if you lose it all, it's fine. It's $100 Okay, so last question for you, Yueqi. As you have studied the smaller banks and then the trading firms as well, and you're seeing where the tides are going, do you think that the bigger banks will come around to these agents in the next couple months, in 2027, at all? Are they just outright saying no? Because, I mean, the other question is, what do the customers want? Are they actually asking for this? Because if they're not, then maybe it doesn't really matter.
00:15:41 · Akash Pasricha, Yueqi Yang
[00:15:41] S0: It sounds like when parents set up little small $1,000 or $100 trading funds for their kids, they're like, Here, play with this, see what you can do with it, and if you lose it all, it's fine. It's $100 Okay, so last question for you, Yueqi. As you have studied the smaller banks and then the trading firms as well, and you're seeing where the tides are going, do you think that the bigger banks will come around to these agents in the next couple months, in 2027, at all? Are they just outright saying no? Because, I mean, the other question is, what do the customers want? Are they actually asking for this? Because if they're not, then maybe it doesn't really matter. [00:16:21] S2: Yeah, I think this is a hard question for the banks because technologically, they need to figure out how to exactly block all these agents. And sometimes they're just unable to do so if your agent has unlimited access to your mailbox, to your text messages, etcetera. And that's what prompted these banks to update their terms of uses to say that you as a customer own responsibility for actions taken by our agents. And then I think on the other hand, we haven't really heard much from banking regulators about what guidance or expectations they have in terms of banks allowing agents to access bank account. So that's another factor that will influence the decision by banks.
00:16:21 · Yueqi Yang, Akash Pasricha, Paddy Srinivasan
[00:16:21] S2: Yeah, I think this is a hard question for the banks because technologically, they need to figure out how to exactly block all these agents. And sometimes they're just unable to do so if your agent has unlimited access to your mailbox, to your text messages, etcetera. And that's what prompted these banks to update their terms of uses to say that you as a customer own responsibility for actions taken by our agents. And then I think on the other hand, we haven't really heard much from banking regulators about what guidance or expectations they have in terms of banks allowing agents to access bank account. So that's another factor that will influence the decision by banks. [00:17:08] S0: Great. Well, Yueqi, I want to thank you for coming on. That is Yueqi Yang, our crypto reporter, here at The Information. Our next segment is with our partner, DigitalOcean. The Democrats' midterm victories are putting fresh attention on the future of data center development. DigitalOcean is a neo cloud with several data center projects planned for next year. The company also reported quarterly results this week. Here to discuss it all is Paddy Srinivasan, CEO of DigitalOcean. Paddy, welcome back to the show. It's great to have you here. [00:17:40] S3: Thank you, Akash. Wonderful to be here.