AI agents are beginning to hold digital wallets and make payments, but the financial system lacks a standard way to identify one machine counterparty from another. Solowin Holdings signed a memorandum with SC Ventures, Standard Chartered’s venture arm, in April to incubate an AI payments project called AGENPAY. The Hong Kong company, listed on Nasdaq under AXG, is developing Know-Your-Agent, a compliance engine designed to give machine counterparties verifiable identities.
Can AI agents open bank accounts?
“Is an agent gonna be able to open a bank account? Is JP Morgan gonna open an account for an agent?” Yat Siu, executive chairman of Animoca Brands, said on the On The Margin podcast. “Probably not gonna happen, right? So how do they do that? They have a wallet. We actually think you know agents with wallets essentially become autonomous economic actors who then basically do not just trade but buy and do stuff. They can use a stablecoin, right? We already have agents that are trading on hyperliquid. I have two hundred and eighty agents now doing all sorts of stuff.”
Siu estimates that the eventual number of AI agents could reach “anywhere from 50 to 100 billion agents minimum.” He expects financial activity to expand alongside that population.
“The total advertising, online advertising revenues is around $900 billion a year,” he said. “That’s all gonna shift into a kind of transactional invocation economy powered by agents.”
“The next step, which is already starting, is that the AI agents start transacting on your behalf. So they pay for things, they sign up for services, they probably handle your financial transactions now,” Varun Kabra, chief growth officer at Concordium, said on On The Margin. “The counterparty on the other side, the airline in this case, or the ticketing platform, whatever it is, they have no way to verify whether a real accountable human is behind the transaction. And that could open a door to fraud, bots acting as humans, agents operating with no accountability.”
“You’re quickly gonna realize because our entire financial ecosystem was primarily human-centric,” Chandler Fung, co-founder of t54 Labs, said in an interview. “The entire society is a trust business.”
Most banks still prevent AI agents from accessing customer funds, creating an opening that Solowin spent 2026 targeting.
“AI doesn’t have a transaction layer right now,” Atul Khekade, co-founder of XDC Network, said in an interview. “AI platforms don’t have a monetization compliance layer that they can use for, like, real transactions to execute actions. insurance companies, banks, fintech providers, airline companies, a lot of them are coming to us now.”
Thomas Zhu, a Solowin director and co-founder of its AlloyX subsidiary, was an executive director in Goldman Sachs’ securities division from 2015 to 2020. He later led digital assets at China Asset Management (Hong Kong), which listed some of Asia’s first spot bitcoin and ether ETFs in 2024.
“Without compliant governance, AI-stablecoin integration will remain experimental,” Zhu said in written answers to questions.
The financial rails behind AI agents
Solowin’s Bahrain subsidiary received a license from the country’s central bank in June to issue stablecoins, becoming the first company granted approval under that framework. The stablecoin itself has not yet launched.
“Agents are like fundamentally about outsourcing a purchase and anyone who has ever outsourced a purchase knows that this comes with trade-offs,” Nitya Subramanian, chief executive of wallet infrastructure firm Para, said on On The Margin. “Wallets are ultimately the authorization and control flow layer of anything that’s happening on chain. Every chain, every DeFi primitive, every action that you can take on chain needs to go through a wallet. And I feel like people still don’t fully get that.”
“I could create a stable coin backed card and give it $200 a week and just have it buy Chipotle,” Subramanian said, describing the spending limits she would impose. “So it’s only allowed to buy my Chipotle bowl every day.”
“I think in the past 12 months, there’s been over 300 million unique users of stablecoins, which is an absurdly high number,” Patrick Kim, a researcher at crypto data firm Artemis, said on On The Margin, referring to the settlement asset that banks spent 2026 pursuing. “If you told this to someone five years ago, they would look you dead in the eyes and say, you’re bullshitting me, like you’re bluffing.”
Stablecoin supply stood at $308 billion on Aug. 13, according to Reap’s 2026 stablecoin data. Every major bank is now expected to launch a stablecoin.
What AI agents could trade
“Reality is the world that we’ve been living in for crypto for the past few years has been a lot of these, you know, quote unquote unsexy use cases, right? Like bringing private credit on chain, bringing equities on chain,” Kim said.
Zhu expects AI agents to trade those types of assets, beginning with government bonds and money-market funds before expanding into real estate and private credit. He sees the products being offered to banks as a service rather than developed entirely in-house.
Solowin operates a tokenization platform called Ferion and backed a funding round for Libeara in April. Libeara is a Singapore-based platform also supported by SC Ventures.
“You own the token and the token is the asset, you own the asset. It’s different. It’s what we call title tokenization,” Chris Turner, co-founder of impact investment platform Kula, said in an interview, describing the distinction at the center of the $80 billion tokenization market. Most of the market offers a weaker structure, he said: “it’s giving a contractual exposure to the economic upside of that particular asset. But you don’t own the asset.”
Zhu identified the main challenges as “cross-jurisdictional legal affirmation, custody and regulatory compliance.”
Solowin’s AI payments business
Solowin reported revenue of $28.05 million for the year ended March 31, an 895% increase, according to its 6-K filing. AI infrastructure fees accounted for $22.2 million of that total.
The company’s operating expenses reached $40.14 million, resulting in a net loss of $13.29 million. Solowin also acquired AlloyX for $350 million in stock as it expanded its reach into the UAE, ASEAN and Africa.
“The last time we had a new financial rail was probably credit cards in the 70s,” Subramanian said. “And so it’s probably the most exciting time in many of our, if not most of our careers to be building in either FinTech or crypto.”
“if you refuse to access it, if you say I don’t want anything to do with it, that’s no different than saying I don’t want to be on the internet,” Siu said.
