Compliance and Risk in the Age of Agentic AI: What Bankers Should Ask Vendors

We all know the age-old banking technology question: “is it secure?” (asked shortly after, “does this connect to my core”, of course.) The default answer from any vendor will always be yes. It’s something that the financial technology world has hammered into them from day one, especially with the rise of sophisticated cyber attack mechanisms. But that’s not the question that’ll separate a governed deployment from an exposed one.

The Questions That’ll Separate Vendors

While seemingly simple, the next era of diligence looks a little different. Here are the things you should be focusing on when onboarding or assessing a new vendor in the age of agentic AI:

Scope: First and foremost, determining what the agent can decide without any human intervention, and the full documentation around how that authority is controlled. Ask them to show you the actual written documents that define these boundaries, not only verbally describe them. Understand how the agent was trained and how the bank will be kept up to date on future iterations of their models. Does the scope get redefined when a new model update happens, or does existing boundaries simply carry forward.

Audit trail: Is every decision made by the agent logged, timestamped, and traceable back to a source or decisioning split? Or is the auditing function still a future roadmap item for the vendor. Some tools are built around this from the start. Grandir, Linker Finance’s Agentic AI Customer Intelligence layer, for example, traces every output back to a source and role-based permissions, so the answer to “who saw this and why” is clearly documented.

Explainability: Can the vendor cleanly explain the reason the agent decided to deny or flag a customer in a way your examiner is satisfied with? Or does the AI reasoning live in a black box? Does the vendor have a full understanding of why certain decisions are made and what future data might impact how that works today?

Override paths: Is the vendor or bank able to stop the action via human interaction before it becomes irreversible, or is intervention only post-action? What’s the process of doing such an override, and who has the authority to do so?

Data handling: Is the bank’s data being used to train the vendors’ models? Does that training then only impact the model your bank uses, or does the training impact all other banks’ models and decisioning trees? Does the data the agent acts on live within the bank or does it leave the enclosed environment to go elsewhere for action? Be highly specific regarding data portability, especially if the data is going to live outside your bank’s core.

Sniffing Out the Imposters

Those who’ve spent their careers evaluating technology won’t be surprised by the tell-tale signs that should flag some concerns. It won’t be a clearly “bad” answer, per se, but rather, a vague one.

A company that’s built specifically around these criteria will be quick to get specific with their answers. They may get detailed around sharing that any action the agent comes upon over $X or other high-risk criteria gets routed for approval before execution, and here’s how long that takes.

Ones that haven’t yet reach for more generic answers: think “enterprise-grade”, “bank-level security” or other seemingly reassuring but intentionally vague responses. A vague answer may look like “a human can always be in the loop.”

Procurement Will Be Your First AI Control

Education and preparedness, not just moving slowly on AI, is what will prepare a bank best for managing the risk associated with implementing agentic AI-powered solutions. None of these questions are complicated or tricky, which is what makes it even easier to weed out the vendors who can’t answer them clearly.

By knowing what questions to ask, and why they’re important, any bank can be prepared to go on and answer these same types of questions in an exam. Any vendor worth partnering with is already building for an audit standard that doesn’t even fully exist in practice yet.

“Is it secure” has always been a simpler question, with a straightforward answer. These five don’t, which is exactly what makes them most worth asking.

Want to see more on how traced to the source and role-based designs can answer these questions in practice? Let’s chat.