A senior investor at QED Investors, Victoria Zuo, has highlighted the need for the financial industry to address the trust gap in agentic payments. According to Zuo, the industry has yet to price the new liability surface that autonomous AI agents create when they transact on behalf of consumers. This gap in trust is significant, and Zuo herself has not connected her financial accounts to a general-purpose AI assistant, citing concerns over security and control.
Zuo’s analysis focuses on the distinction between human-present and human-not-present transactions, drawing an analogy with the existing difference in interchange rates between card-present and card-not-present transactions. She argues that vendors should be rewarded for the higher risk associated with human-not-present transactions, similar to how interchange fees are structured. The key to limiting chargebacks and fraudulent requests in an agentic environment lies in authentication and authorisation.
The Trust Gap and Institutional Ambivalence
The gap between the technology’s capability and institutional trust in it remains wide, with many professionals, including Zuo, reflecting this ambivalence. Despite being an active follower of AI developments, she expects specialist vertical agents in financial services and healthcare to earn trust before general-purpose horizontal agents do. This perspective informs her investment interest in startups focused on granular permission controls for payments.
In the context of agentic payments, merchants and financial-services providers need to rethink distribution when the end customer is an AI agent rather than a person. Lorikeet, a Sydney-based portfolio company, is building infrastructure to help merchants serve structured information directly to agents completing transactions on behalf of consumers. This shift in distribution requires merchants to optimize their data for machine decision-makers, rather than human consumers.
Regulatory Debate and Market Context
The trust and liability questions raised by Zuo are at the center of a fast-developing regulatory debate. Regulatory frameworks, such as the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority and the EU’s AI Act and PSD3, are grappling with the implications of agentic payments. The interplay between these frameworks remains unsettled, with the Financial Conduct Authority yet to provide clear guidance on accountability when an AI agent is involved in a financial transaction.
From an investment standpoint, QED’s framing suggests that financial services could function as a revenue model embedded inside personal AI agents, rather than as a standalone product category. The firm is looking beyond pure-play fintech into the infrastructure that enables AI-native applications to route and control money. The near-term signal will be which startups secure the first credible licensing arrangements or banking-as-a-service partnerships to underpin these capabilities.
