Do you remember when open banking was going to be the revolution?

In Europe it came with PSD2. In the US, years of debate on open banking rules. In Asia, regulators pushed banks to open their APIs. Banks would open up, and tech players would come in and own, at least, the digital relationship with the client. That was the promise.

Then it quietly lost momentum. Open banking is still there, but it lost its reason why. Very few people today connect all their accounts to a single bank or a single fintech. Even fewer move money from one single point of access.

Now AI agents are bringing it back. Not regulation driven. Unregulated. Driven by the consumer's wish to hand over boring, recurring tasks, like logging into a banking app.

Yesterday the FT reported that Citi is restricting third-party AI agents from logging into customer accounts. BofA is doing the same until it's clear who is liable when an AI approves a payment. JPMorgan moved first. Schwab says it blocks dozens of agent attempts every week, Meta's Muse included.

The official reason is liability. If the agent makes a mistake, who pays? The bank? The agent provider? The customer?

Fair question. But follow the money.

Agents like Muse in the US help people save while shopping, cut their utility bills, and put idle cash to work. Cash that sits in current accounts paying ridiculous interest. Zero, or even negative, as in Europe, once you count account fees and inflation.

According to the FT, JPMorgan, BofA and Wells Fargo hold $1.6T of deposits paying no interest. Paying 3% on that would cost about $47B a year. Close to half their combined earnings.

The math is brutal.

Traditional retail banking was built on customer inertia. On the reluctance to move cash out of a current account and invest it somewhere, without really understanding where.

That inertia gave banks a wide spread between deposit and lending rates.

And there is a second point, in my view even more important. The whole sale of financial products in a bank rests on one idea: "I'll help you. Trust me, I'm a bank."

Today you can reach a level of intimacy with your own AI agent where you trust it far more than a third party. Especially a third party whose job is to sell you products.

I use agents every day. I haven't given one access to my bank. I gave read-only access to my Interactive Brokers portfolio.

I'm reluctant to let it transact too, I'll be honest. I'm afraid of mistakes. But the agent asks you before every step. You have to really put everything on autopilot and walk away to get burned. And then, sorry, the responsibility is also yours.

So yes, there is a real topic of liability, guardrails and permissions. Agents should earn their way from read to write.

But this is open banking in reverse. Regulation forced banks to open. Here the consumer, through agents, forces the opening, and the banks go to the regulator to protect their business. More than to protect their client, which, honestly, they have struggled to do for years.

It's the same with shopping. Amazon's model is built on advertising. If an agent compares price and quality for me without me ever entering the shop, the ad revenue disappears.

I believe a lot in agentic shopping. I've already used it, not on Amazon, and it works really well. A headless purchase: no UI, no UX, no endless scrolling. Just a much more informed decision.

Banks built on inertia. Retailers built on attention. Agents remove both.

The banks that win won't be the ones that block agents. They'll be the ones agents choose.

- SL