15th Septem 2026
At a FutureMode panel at AWS’s Taipei office, banks, virtual-asset firms and infrastructure providers outlined the emerging rulebook for “Know Your Agent” payments.
By Joe Pan
“Web3 is programmable money. And for programmable money, our view is that it is programmable compliance,” VerifyVASP CEO ShihYun Chia told Taiwan blockchain and fintech operators. The line captured FutureMode’s core theme: AI agents may eventually buy, pay and settle for consumers, but their financial adoption requires compliance, traceability and a framework called Know Your Agent, or KYA.
Taiwan’s financial sector is building rails for agentic payments, as banks, virtual asset service providers (VASPs), cloud platforms and security firms align on identity, authorization, auditability and data controls.
The discussion occurred during FutureMode, the successor to Taiwan Blockchain Week. The AWS-hosted panel followed a side event moderated by Henry Lin, founding chairperson of the Blockchain and Digital Assets Association (BCDA). Across both sessions, the core question was not whether AI can initiate payments, but who can prove agent authorization, explain decisions and stop faulty instructions before transactions settle.
BlockChain Security Chief Technology Officer Eric Chou said the sector could quickly shift from customer verification to autonomous control layers.
“未來可能已經從人而馬上跳到 AI agent 的 Know Your AI Agent,” Chou said, noting the industry may quickly shift from knowing human customers to knowing AI agents.
That transition requires more than attaching chatbots to wallets. In an interview, Chou said BlockChain Security was commissioned by a major Taiwanese bank to build agentic payment infrastructure and Model Context Protocol (MCP) integrations for retail stablecoins. He declined to name the bank or provide a timeline.
The project highlights an emerging use case: an AI agent accesses merchant data, evaluates payment conditions and executes a stablecoin transaction. However, the bank must log agent authorization, designated wallets, spending limits, merchant restrictions and pre-transaction controls.
At the BCDA event, Lin outlined a human-first authorization model. Rather than certifying AI agents as standalone entities, systems verify the individual behind the agent and establish operational authority. Verifiable Credentials (VCs) could record this link: an issuer grants a credential to an individual, who authorizes an agent to execute specific tasks like purchases.
“The agent needs to be tagged to an individual who then has control over a wallet,” Chia said. “With that tagging, then it becomes linkable to an individual on that agent.”
Compliance Becomes the Product
ZONE Wallet founder and CEO David Wang said the main challenge is making protections invisible to users. Taiwan’s VASP sector has spent years developing KYC, risk classification, transaction monitoring, sanctions screening and on-chain analytics as regulations tightened.
“We need to put compliance directly into the product, so customers feel as little of the compliance pressure as possible,” Wang said. “Only after doing that can we make the on-chain experience as smooth as using online banking or an e-commerce website.”
This positioning gives VASPs a key role alongside banks in agentic commerce. While banks provide regulated custody, client relationships and fiat gateways, VASPs contribute wallet expertise, blockchain settlement, Travel Rule messaging and crypto compliance. Cloud platforms supply secure environments and logs. The resulting payment rail will function as a relay team, not a solo sprint.
Chia noted programmable compliance enables precise data sharing. To sell restricted items, merchants do not need full identity files—only cryptographic proof that a buyer meets age requirements.
“The programmable-compliance part just needs to know I am more than 18 years old in order to buy a pack of cigarettes with USDT,” Chia said. “It does not need to know my date of birth.”
This model allows agentic payment systems to minimize data disclosure while preserving verifiable audit trails for compliance institutions.
The FutureMode discussion expanded beyond payments. Jeff, a security specialist, detailed the risks created when AI agents access local files, emails, enterprise credentials and external tools.
“If your counterparty is a sanctioned wallet, the consequence may be more than financial loss,” Jeff said. “Your whole operation may face regulatory or sanctions risk.”
He stressed that agent security requires lifecycle coverage—design, coding, testing, deployment, continuous monitoring, incident response and threat updates—rather than a one-time audit as models, permissions and tools evolve.
Chou also emphasized explainability in financial crime workflows. While BlockChain Security uses AI agents to streamline blockchain analysis for compliance teams, outputs must be inspectable for judicial or banking use.
“When we use AI to produce a report, whether a court can trust it becomes a major question,” Chou said. “We need to ensure the report can be examined.”
AWS Business Development Manager Ariel Cheng said AI automates first-line KYC, anti-money laundering and suspicious activity reporting. However, she warned that productivity gains cannot compromise governance, especially when using large language models with external data processing, storage or training.
Cheng said AWS provides secure infrastructure—audit logs, isolated environments and enterprise AI tools in private clouds—allowing VASPs, banks and developers to build compliance solutions rather than AWS building them directly.
Her conclusion provided a key rule for Taiwan’s agentic payment rollout: “讓後續專業的法遵人員以 Human in the Loop 的方式，在最後面做最後的把關跟審核。” Final reviews, she emphasized, must remain with qualified human compliance professionals.
About the Arthur
Joe Pan is an editor and producer at Blockwind News. An early adopter of blockchain technology, he has covered major crypto conferences globally since 2019 and moderated Web3 events across Asia. Joe is part of the founding team of Blockwind News and teaches Asia’s first Master of Journalism course on “Covering Cryptocurrency and Blockchain” at Hong Kong Baptist University.
