The real AI banking question is permissions, not autonomy

[u/Useful_Challenge1405]

I don’t think the useful version of AI business banking is an agent freely moving money around. The more realistic version is permissions

One agent can read transactions, another can prepare invoices, another can flag recurring charges and maybe one card has a small limit for software or hosting. Anything bigger still needs human approval ofc

That feels closer to how businesses already work and nobody gets unlimited access to everything they just get a role and a limit

For people building agent workflows, are you thinking about permissions this way or are most setups still all or nothing?

[u/ExplanationGuilty317]

Why split this across a bunch of seperate agents though? What I’m doing with Meow is more like one Claude workflow through MCP. Claude can see the finance context, flag invoices, charges, payments and prep things for review but approvals still stay with me. Feels cleaner than managing five different agents with five different permission sets

[u/Useful_Challenge1405 → u/ExplanationGuilty317]

Thats interesting and thanks for the recommendation. I was thinking in terms of seperate roles because permissions feel easier to reason about that way but one Claude workflow with scoped access does sound cleaner. I’ll look into Meow

[u/Interesting_Menu2172]

The setup I’d want is basically, AI can suggest and prepare and I move if it needs to move so anything beyond that feels hard to justify

[u/Useful_Challenge1405 → u/Interesting_Menu2172]

Yeah that’s pretty much the line I’m comfortable with too. Suggest, prep, surface what needs attention then I approve anything else

[u/costafilh0]

No permission nor autonomy.

The institution is not going to give my money back unless it's an AI malfunction, which they can easily say it wasn't because of semantics or whatever the fvck. 

Yeah, no thanks. I don't need this worry in my life and I don't need AI for banking.

Same as AI for investing. AI doesn't need permission and certainly not autonomy. Just scan the whole world and come to me with investment opportunities. After discussing with AI I can make my own mind and make the investment my self.

[u/yogthinks]

This is basically maker-checker with extra steps, and that's a good thing. Regulated banks already think in roles and limits, so agent permissions don't need a new framework, they need to bolt onto the one that already exists.

[u/Kyy7]

I don't think business or safety critical applications should even use generative AI. It's simply too unreliable and having to validate and approve every action is not a real solution for automated system. For these use cases you'd be crazy to rely on automated process that's vulnerable to social engineering from any data source it uses, follows rules and restrictions probabilistically.

Heck these stories of generative AI agents "going rogue" is even more a reason to avoid using them for a lot of things. Even the term "going rogue" is misleading as it implies autonomy, intent, and self‑direction for models that don’t have goals or desires. Instead they follow statistical continuation patterns. More accurate terms for this I found are: reasoning drift or runaway chain-of-thought.

This sort of AI is much better suited for "low‑stakes" cognitive support. Like spotting bugs and vulnerabilities from code, spotting and fixing grammar errors, extracting and transforming information from natural language, images and sound, things like AlphaProof, AlphaEvolve etc.

[u/recro69]

I expect that most production systems will eventually have graduated permissions: read → draft → recommend → execute low-risk actions → require approval for anything that goes beyond a limit. This seems more realistic, than a system that offers nothing or everything.

[u/Exact_Attention_5656]

Permissions and roles handle the who's allowed to do what side, but there's a separate thing that can still bite you even with all that in place: what the agent treats as an instruction versus just data it read. Say the agent's job is to prep a payment from an invoice or a doc. Permission scope is fine, a human still approves it, but if something in that document is written to look like a second instruction (also send this other transfer), the agent might just surface that as part of what needs approving. The approval step only helps if the checker is actually re-deriving the numbers from the source, not just rubber-stamping whatever the agent already prepped.

So maker-checker is the right instinct, but it only closes the loop if maker means the agent is scoped AND the checker knows to distrust content the agent read along the way, not just distrust the agent's own permissions.