# Know Your Agent: who's accountable when AI handles your payments?

> Before an AI agent prepares your payments, you need to know who controls it, what it can do and who's accountable. Five principles and five questions for finance teams.

Payments · AI · 29 October 2026 · 7 min read

Imagine giving an AI agent responsibility for preparing £100,000 worth of payments.

It can collect invoices, check contracts, verify payment details, spot discrepancies and assemble a payment run. What used to take your finance team days could be done in hours.

But before you give that agent access to your financial systems, there are some important questions. Who authorised it? What exactly is it allowed to do? Can it change someone's bank details? Can it release funds? And if something goes wrong, who's accountable?

These aren't hypothetical concerns. As AI agents move beyond answering questions and start doing operational work, businesses need a new approach to trust and control.

We already have Know Your Customer (KYC) and Know Your Business (KYB) to verify who we're dealing with. The payments industry has started applying the same idea to AI agents, under the name Know Your Agent (KYA). We believe finance teams should apply that discipline to every AI agent working inside their systems.

## From AI assistants to AI agents

Until recently, most businesses used AI to write content, summarise information or answer questions. That's changing. AI agents can now use software, retrieve information, complete tasks and coordinate work across several systems.

For finance teams, the opportunity is significant. Consider a business managing hundreds of creator payments a month. Each payment might involve an invoice, a contract, tax documents, bank details, approval rules and a foreign currency transfer. Much of that work is still manual: chasing missing invoices, checking payment details, reconciling records and preparing payment runs.

AI agents can take on much of that workload. But there's a fundamental difference between an agent drafting an email and one operating inside your financial infrastructure.

> The closer an agent gets to moving money, the more its permissions, controls and accountability matter.

## What is Know Your Agent?

Know Your Agent means establishing trust in an AI agent before it does work in your business. Before an agent starts, you should understand who controls it, what it can access, what it's authorised to do and how its actions can be reviewed.

For finance teams, we think five principles should underpin it.

- **Identity: know which agent is acting** Every agent needs a named owner and a defined role. You should know who deployed it, which systems it works in and who's responsible for it. It should never act anonymously or share credentials that make its actions impossible to tell apart from a person's.
- **Authority: define what it can do** Access shouldn't mean unrestricted authority. An agent preparing creator payments needs to read invoices, check contracts and build a run. It doesn't need to change bank details, override approvals or release funds. And it should never be able to expand its own authority.
- **Purpose: give it a defined job** "Prepare this week's approved creator invoices" is a task with clear boundaries. "Manage all company payments" is not. Agents should work to clear objectives, with set rules for missing information and exceptions.
- **Evidence: make every action traceable** You should be able to see what an agent did, what information it used, what checks it ran and where a person stepped in. If an invoice is flagged as a duplicate, or a payment is held for missing documents, the reason should be on record.
- **Accountability: keep people in control** An agent can do the work, but the business is still responsible for financial decisions. Your team should be able to review its work, investigate exceptions, suspend its access and step in before anything consequential happens.

The aim isn't human approval for every task. It's making sure people stay in charge wherever the financial risk demands it.

## What this looks like in creator payments

Take a creator-led beauty brand working with 300 influencers a month across the UK, Europe and the US. Its finance team receives invoices by email, checks amounts against contracts, chases missing information and prepares payments in several currencies. It's fragmented, repetitive and hard to scale.

Now add an AI agent to that workflow. How it's set up makes all the difference.

| Without the right controls | With Know Your Agent |
|---|---|
| The agent has broad access to payment systems | The agent can only do the work it's there for |
| It could change a creator's bank details | It can't change bank details. Creators update their own |
| It could process an incorrect invoice | It matches every invoice to the contract and flags what doesn't fit |
| It could act outside its intended authority | Anything outside its authority is flagged for review |
| You find out after the money has gone | By default a person approves every run. Where a business extends that authority to the agent, it should be within explicit limits, logged and revocable. |

With the right controls, the agent can:

- Collect and organise incoming creator invoices
- Match invoices against agreed contracts and payment terms
- Spot duplicates, discrepancies and missing documents
- Follow up with creators for outstanding information
- Prepare a proposed payment run for the finance team

Invoice in (Collected and read) → Matched (To contract and terms) → Checked (Duplicates, missing documents) → Approved (By a person) → Paid (After approval)

The agent does the collecting, matching, checking and chasing. By default a person approves every run. Where a business extends that authority to the agent, it should be within explicit limits, logged and revocable.

The finance team receives a prepared payment run, the evidence behind it and a clear view of anything that needs attention. Instead of gathering information and chasing creators, the team reviews exceptions and approves payments.

> The agent handles the admin. Finance keeps the authority.

## Why this matters beyond creator payments

Creator payments are one example of a much broader shift. As agents become more capable, businesses will use them across accounts payable, accounts receivable, procurement and reconciliation. They could help businesses handle more transactions without growing admin headcount at the same rate.

But agents bring new governance requirements. Traditional software permissions decide which systems a user or application can access. With AI agents, you also need to decide which tasks an agent is authorised to do, how it interprets instructions and when it must escalate a decision.

**Connecting the agent is the easy part.** Hooking an agent up to accounting software or a payment platform is relatively straightforward. Setting the right controls around it is the hard part, and it's where most of the risk sits.

The challenge isn't just making AI agents capable of finance work. It's making them trustworthy enough to operate inside the systems your business depends on.

## Five questions every CFO should ask

Before you introduce an AI agent into finance operations, you should be able to answer these:

- **Who owns the agent?** Is a named person or team accountable for it?
- **What can it access and change?** Are its permissions limited to the work it needs to do?
- **What can it decide on its own?** Are there explicit limits on payments, bank detail changes and approvals?
- **Can we audit its work?** Is there reliable evidence of what it did, the checks it ran and the exceptions it raised?
- **Can we step in?** Can the right people review its decisions, override it and switch it off?

If you can't answer these clearly, rethink how much authority you're giving the agent.

## How we're approaching this at StrideHQ

StrideHQ is the agentic creator payments platform for talent agencies and brands. It brings creator payment workflows into one place, so finance teams can manage creator information, prepare payments and see where every payment stands.

Our agents take on the repetitive work: collecting invoices, checking information, chasing missing details and preparing payment runs. Your finance team keeps control of every approval.

**An agent prepares every run. You approve it.** See how StrideHQ's payments agent builds the run, flags what needs checking and waits for your sign-off. [How the agent works](https://stridehq.ai/agent.md)

## Trust has to be built in

AI agents will change how businesses operate. For finance teams, the prize isn't only time saved. It's handling more transactions, more creators and more complex workflows without adding admin overhead.

But the businesses that benefit most won't be the ones that give AI the most freedom. They'll be the ones that strike the right balance between automation and control.

> KYC verifies who gets paid. KYA governs the agent preparing the payment.

Know your agent. Define its authority. Keep control of the decisions that matter.

## Sources

- PYMNTS: [Visa and Mastercard team with Ant on Know Your Agent framework](https://www.pymnts.com/cybersecurity/2026/visa-mastercard-team-with-ant-know-your-agent-framework/), 2026
- Biometric Update: [Trulioo partners with Worldpay to offer Know Your Agent to merchants](https://www.biometricupdate.com/202508/trulioo-partners-with-payment-platform-worldpay-to-offer-know-your-agent-to-merchants), August 2025