Artificial intelligence is pushing financial systems toward a model where machines execute transactions at scale, posing new challenges around control, oversight and infrastructure, Microsoft and Chainalysis executives said.
Bill Borden, corporate vice president of worldwide financial services at Microsoft, said Tuesday that legacy systems will face increasing pressure as transaction demands become more complex. The tipping point comes when “latency, scale and complexity start to impact your ability to compete,” forcing companies to rethink how their systems are built, he said at an event hosted by Alchemy in New York City.
While automation has long been a part of finance, Borden said the focus is now shifting from capability to trust. “It’s not a question of whether technology can automate…execute a hedging strategy; that can be done. The question is: Can it be trusted? Can it be audited and controlled?” said.
Microsoft, which offers its own AI assistant in many of its products, is developing tools to manage that transition, including systems that assign identities and permissions to AI agents and track their actions. In regulated environments, Borden said companies must be able to show “what controlled it” and whether a system “followed policy” when decisions are made without direct human intervention.
Jonathan Levin, co-founder and CEO of Chainalysis, said the crypto sector already offers a working model for automated finance. Blockchain networks process large volumes of transactions through smart contracts and software-based wallets, creating what he described as an environment similar to agent-based systems. “We have been preparing for these moments long before other parts of the financial services industry,” Levin said.
That experience extends to risk management. Levin pointed to efforts to track illicit funds in “thousands of different wallets” as an example of the type of monitoring needed in a system where transactions occur at scale without direct human intervention.
Looking ahead, both executives expect a combination of systems to coexist. Levin said that “most of the commerce within 10 years will be in public infrastructure,” while Borden pointed to a more integrated approach that links public blockchains, private networks and existing rails.
“I think traditional rails will still exist,” Borden said, and software will act as the layer that connects them.
