America’s biggest banks spent mid-October shutting the door on outside AI agents. JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said on Oct. 13 that the bank blocks external agents from operating customer a
America’s biggest banks spent mid-October shutting the door on outside AI agents.
JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said on Oct. 13 that the bank blocks external agents from operating customer accounts. Within days, Bank of America, Citi and Wells Fargo moved to restrict them too.
Prashant Reddy, co-founder and CEO of Artian AI, doesn’t read that as rejection.
“I actually don’t see a lot of refusing to adopt,” Reddy told TheStreet Roundtable at Money20/20 USA.
Reddy led AI and data engineering at JPMorgan before founding Artian. The startup has raised $8 million to date, including a $6 million seed round led by Work-Bench, and builds agentic AI systems for financial institutions.
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Reddy said agentic trading “has existed in the institutional space for almost twenty years now.”
Those earlier systems are rules-based algorithms rather than AI agents, but they already handle the majority of U.S. equity volume.
Robinhood is trying to move into the gap between retail and institutional trading. The broker opened its platform to AI agents on May 27, and by its third-quarter results on Oct. 27, about 200,000 customers had opened agentic trading accounts, generating more than $1.6 billion in cumulative notional volume.
Reddy said Robinhood’s push is “about scaling” and building consumer trust in the algorithm. Inside banks, he sees a bigger internal opportunity in helping firms move staff into new business lines quickly.
Dimon has said JPMorgan already uses AI agents internally and plans to deploy them in customer-facing apps.
Part of the fear behind the blocks is about money. Apollo chief economist Torsten Slok warned in September that agents could sweep household cash automatically out of checking accounts paying a 0.1% national average and into accounts paying 3.3% to 5%. That would drain the cheap deposits banks lend against.
Reddy said AI is making work once “considered an unreasonable amount of effort” economically viable, which “is going to create new market structures.” Institutions that didn’t anticipate those shifts respond the same way every time, he said.
“The initial reaction is no, that’s not allowed until the institution figures out what are the right controls,” Reddy said.
Electronic and algorithmic trading received the same response and scrutiny before becoming mainstream for institutional and retail traders alike.
His advice is to start with lower-risk processes and expand as best practices form. Ignoring the shift entirely, he warned, would be a mistake.
“If it’s here, you have to use it,” Reddy said. “Otherwise you’re gonna be left behind.”
