We co-hosted an AgentFi event last week with
@FTDA_US,
@Ripple, and
@t54ai. It was part of Fintech Week SF. We had two panels covering consumer and institutional AgentFi. Some takeaways:
* When you think of AgentFi, you may just think of trading, but finance is bigger than trading. Agents will play a role in all financial professions: financial analysis, tax auditing, portfolio management, risk analysis, credit analysis, and others. OpenAI/Anthropic won't build dominant products for any of these segments - they can vibe code a demo, get media attention and distribution, and spook the markets, but unless they focus on specific financial verticals, their demos will stay just that.
* Who will win, incumbents or startups? Incumbents have existing products, users, and capital. Fintech incumbents like Robinhood are adopting AI quickly and pushing regulatory limits with things like their new trading MCP. This will lead to greater trade volume for them and more overall use among institutional incumbents that provide agentic access. On the other hand, startups are nimble and often have even greater risk tolerance, so they could leap past incumbents, serve as good design partners, be investment hedges, or become acquisition targets.
* It's worth distinguishing AgentFi from the agentic economy. Economics includes topics such as shopping, production, inflation, and market trends. We're currently in the early phase of the agentic economy, and many problems need to be solved: agentic-consumer trust, authorizations, guardrails, liability, and insurance. As the agentic economy takes off, I expect to see exciting dynamics between startups and incumbents.