118 Agentic to thecore Agentic AI allows corporate and retail banks to rethink the way they work. Jacqui Griffiths asks Microsoft’s Tyler Pichach and Emmanuel Baviere to share how it is transforming payments and core systems Banks are embracing AI to drive smarter processes and better customer experience – but research suggests 55 per cent still see the limitations of their core system as an obstacle to achieving their business goals. It doesn’t have to be that way. For the frontier banks rearchitecting themselves around AI, the core is still central to their ambitions. “Operating models are changing as work is redesigned around outcomes instead of processes,” says Tyler Pichach, Microsoft’s global head of AI strategy and go to market, payments and banking. “Banks can now modernise around the core, expose reliable capabilities through APIs and use agentic orchestration to turn fragmented processes into end-to-end execution. The core remains the trusted system of record, but it is no longer the only place where innovation can happen.” Banks build their business on trust, and protecting it is a key principle of this transformation. That means navigating a shifting trust boundary, as autonomous technology changes the way data, users and transactions move between systems and services. “When an agent can learn, call other agents and act through systems, the trust boundary ceases to be the login screen and becomes every decision made by the agent on behalf of the bank,” says Emmanuel Baviere, financial services frontier industry advisor at Microsoft. “Three elements move within this boundary that were once outside: the data the agent reads, the reasoning it applies and the actions it triggers. Protecting all three starts by treating agents as first-order identities with rights and duties. Know Your Agent principles are essential. In addition, Microsoft Entra Purview and a control layer such as Agent 365 exist to provide security, compliance and oversight for an entire fleet of agents.” Pichach points to corporate and commercial banks as the industry’s clearest examples of frontier firms. In these institutions, a single transaction can cross multiple teams and systems – while their clients experience just one bank. FINANCIAL SERVICES
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