AI agents get closer to the money, and the money gets pricier

Agents need a record of intent

American Express is introducing a framework designed to capture and authenticate a customer's purchase intent before an AI agent completes the transaction, and the company hopes the "Intent Intelligence Framework" becomes an industry standard. Amex said the Intent ID and token can be used in different parts of the transaction process, helping companies to manage areas like fraud prevention and dispute resolution.

No rise in disputes yet

Amex also said it has not yet seen an increase in disputes because of agentic commerce, but it wanted to be proactive as this type of commerce scales.

Agents inside bank engineering

IBM says Mashreq cut integration design and troubleshooting time by up to 70% in an early pilot of IBM Bob. A gateway built on Model Context Protocol (MCP) handles about 4,000 AI-agent requests a month across Mashreq's banking, payments and enterprise systems.

The price of AI infrastructure

On 7 Oct, The Star reported that JPMorgan was pitching a yield of about 11% on a US$5bil leveraged-loan sale for Volta Infrastructure Holdings, one of the highest borrowing costs seen in the market for risky debt that has become popular for financing the AI boom. DBS CEO Tan described the repricing as healthy.

What to watch in your own role

If we work in payments or risk, the question is what record an agent leaves for each transaction, and in credit it is how the terms on AI-related loans are shifting. Which of those would we want to understand first?