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SMA Crown Confidential Notebook – Note: On A Customer's Behalf
Occasion: A bank (NAB) said it will soon begin testing the security and operational guardrails on an agentic platform whose stated end-state is agents that “interact with us [the bank] on a customer’s behalf” — customer-authorised agents acting into the bank’s own systems — with customer-facing pilots only over the next year (REPORTED — a bank executive describing its own roadmap; testing not yet begun, and what an authorised agent will be permitted to do not stated).
Position occasioned: on the client’s side of the table — re-lit through the customer-authorised-agent occasion and turned on the gap between acting on your behalf (a task an agent performs in your name) and being on your side (whose interest the instrument was formed to serve, and whom it answers to).
A bank said this week that it will soon begin testing the security and operational guardrails on a class of agents it means to introduce — agents a customer would authorise to act on their behalf, reaching into the bank’s own systems to carry out what they are asked. By the bank’s own account the testing has not started, and what such an agent will be permitted to do is still being drawn. The framing, though, is already clear, and it is the framing we want to sit with: the agent is authorised by the customer, and it acts into the bank.
Read quickly, “on a customer’s behalf” sounds as though it settles the matter of allegiance. The agent is yours; you authorised it; it works for you. That is how the phrase is meant to be heard.
We would separate two things it holds together. Acting on your behalf is a description of a task — the agent does, in your name, something you told it to do. Being on your side is a description of position — whose interest the instrument was built to serve, whom it answers to when the task is done. The two fold into one another easily, because an agent sent to act for you feels like an extension of you. It is not. An agent a bank builds, however a customer authorises it, is still the bank’s instrument. It reaches into the bank’s systems, it is governed by the bank’s guardrails, and it answers, in the end, to the bank. It can perform a task on your behalf and sit, the whole time, on the other side of the table.
This is not an accusation. The bank is a counterparty, not an opponent, and an agent that moves cleanly through its systems on your instruction is a real convenience. But convenience is not allegiance, and the guardrails being tested are the bank’s guardrails — designed, properly, to protect the bank as much as the customer. Whose side an intelligence is on is not something a permission can grant. It is decided earlier, by what the intelligence was formed from.
That is the line we hold. The only link in this chain formed from the client rather than from the institution is the one with no bank behind it and no interest of its own — the one that never reaches into anyone’s systems on your behalf, because it was never built to act on the assets at all. It sits on your side of the table not because it was authorised to, but because there is nothing on the other side of it. That is a different thing from an agent that works for you. It is an intelligence that is yours.
Founder & CEO of SMA Crown Confidential
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