Banks have the vision for AI: real-time personalization, seamless fraud prevention, smarter decisions. What’s missing? A trusted, unified identity layer and the infrastructure to support it.
This is part of our series on Agentic AI and verifiable credentials. Take a look at parts one and two where we provide an overview about the intersection between these two groundbreaking technologies.
By Helen Garneau
Agentic artificial intelligence (AI) is quickly moving beyond buzzword status in financial services to a business imperative and for good reason. The ability to “reason” autonomously makes it a much more powerful problem-solving technology than traditional AI, and this elevates its capacity to transform customer engagement. For an industry known for cautious, incremental change, this kind of intelligent autonomy represents one of the most profound shifts in decades.
But this transformation isn’t just about your bank upgrading its tech stack. It’s a new, bold redesign around the customer’s needs, and combining the data, and the infrastructure needed to support that ambition.
That’s the perspective of i2c CEO Amir Wain. In a recent conversation with PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster, Wain laid out the critical components needed for a successful agentic AI strategy. His central message? The tools are ready; the institutions aren’t.
What’s holding back financial services from adopting AI?
According to Wain, financial institutions have been exploring AI for years, which has led to mature use cases like fraud detection, product recommendations, and back-office automation. But the real breakthrough, he argues, lies in automating entire decision workflows—particularly in fraud response, where AI doesn’t just detect anomalies, but acts on them in real time.
What’s holding this potential back isn’t a lack of innovation, it’s outdated infrastructure. Most banks still operate with fragmented systems: each product line in its own silo, each customer interaction governed by a different identity framework. Data remains locked in legacy environments, making real-time access difficult and integration across services nearly impossible.
Without a single, dynamic view of the customer—spanning loans, credit, deposits, and more—AI systems are left piecing together partial information, making assumptions based on incomplete or inconsistent data. Agentic AI demands the opposite: vast, contextual, high-quality information to operate autonomously and intelligently.
Wain’s message is clear: to unlock the full power of agentic AI, institutions must design around the idea of “one unified customer.” That means eliminating redundant onboarding, unifying data across touchpoints, and embedding trusted identity into every interaction.
“If I still want to interact the same way that I did,” he said, “then I’m really not maximizing the capabilities of agentic AI.”
The missing link: Verifiable Credentials
What’s missing from this new, seamless financial world is identity: the customer’s, the AI agent’s. As we noted in a previous article in this series, for the dream of agentic AI to work, it has to navigate the challenges of privacy and security and their combined existential threat to the customer (or from regulators).
This is why a unified view of the customer can only begin with a trusted, verifiable identity using a single, reusable credential that can authenticate a person securely across systems, services, and product lines.
In Wain’s ideal model, an AI system can seamlessly cross-reference data across accounts, evaluate risk in real time, and generate personalized offers, without forcing the customer through a maze of redundant verification steps.
This level of intelligent automation is only possible when identity and access permissions are embedded directly into the workflow—andthat’s exactly what Verifiable Credentials provide.
Verifiable Credentials act as a force multiplier for financial services, supplying a reliable identity foundation that enables intelligent, automated decision-making from seamless, secure authentication and permissioned data access.
With this infrastructure in place, financial institutions can finally move beyond siloed data and fragmented processes toward something radically better: a self-sovereign, permissioned identity layer. This enables real-time personalization, proactive risk assessment, and seamless fraud prevention—all without compromising privacy or compliance.
A reusable, portable digital credential allows AI systems to instantly understand who the customer is, what permissions they’ve granted, and which data can be used—all in real time.
The result? Concierge-level service at scale: dynamic credit decisions, proactive support, and personalized offers—not just for high-net-worth clients, but for everyone. Because agentic AI doesn’t pause—and with the right trust layer, it doesn’t guess.
The time to build is now
Wain’s message was clear: the organizations that win with agentic AI will be the ones with strong leadership, modern infrastructure, and real-time data access. And that includes verifiable identity.
“People see the power of AI,” Wain said. “And they’re willing to pay for it.”
To seize this opportunity, financial services must act decisively:
- Architect for customer-centricity
- Modernize data systems
- Embed verifiable credentials and identity workflows
- And embrace agentic AI as a core capability—not a bolt-on feature
Indicio Proven makes this real. Built on open standards for Verifiable Credentials and decentralized identity, Proven allows financial institutions to issue, verify, and use trusted digital credentials across their entire ecosystem.
Whether it’s a KYC-verified identity, income proof, or transaction history, Proven transforms sensitive data into cryptographically secure, privacy-preserving credentials—ready for use in any agentic AI interaction.
Don’t retrofit AI into broken systems. Re-architect for intelligence, trust, and scale. Build with Indicio Proven—and create the future of customer-centric financial services.
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