The Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) unveiled Project SAGE in a bid to enable practical applications of agentic finance, while ensuring governance framework is in place.
The initiative, which stands for “Securing Agentic Finance with Governance and Enablement”, seeks to be of aid to responsible development and adoption of agentic finance in Hong Kong.
The move comes amid the continuing development of agentic AI technologies, as HKMA notes that agentic AI has the potential to transform customer engagement with financial services.
However, HKMA said in a press release that the associated risks and challenges need to be properly addressed to support its responsible development and adoption.
Project SAGE will focus on the following key areas:
- Market Development and Use Case Exploration: Support industry participants and their partners in exploring and validating agentic finance use cases and solutions, while facilitating dialogue with the HKMA on practical implementation considerations and challenges. Potential areas of exploration include:
- Business-to-consumer (B2C), such as agentic commerce and everyday payments;
- Business-to-business (B2B), such as procurement and treasury management; and
- Machine-to-machine (M2M), such as usage-based payments for digital services.
- Agent Identity: Explore approaches to verifying A.I. agents’ identities and delegated authority, including Know Your Agent (KYA) practices and authentication mechanisms, to facilitate their trusted participation in financial activities;
- Interoperability Standards: Facilitate industry discussion on interoperability-related topics, including relevant standards and protocols, to support secure and seamless interactions across the agentic finance ecosystem; and
- Legal and Regulatory Frameworks: Exchange views on legal and regulatory considerations arising from agentic finance, including governance arrangement, liability, consumer protection.
Further, the HKMA established the Agentic Finance Expert Group, which comprises relevant stakeholders including financial institutions, technology service providers, professional service firms and academia, to bring together relevant expertise and perspectives and to support the work of Project SAGE.
The Hong Kong regulator’s initiative to explore agentic finance is relevant to CFOs considering that AI agents could automate financial workflows, improve treasury efficiency and support faster decision-making, while introducing new risks around financial controls, accountability and governance.
For enterprise CFOs, the initiative highlights the need to assess how AI agents could handle tasks such as cash management, payment execution and financial analysis, while ensuring that transactions remain secure, auditable and subject to appropriate human oversight.
