Agentic finance is the financial system rebuilt for software that spends. This glossary is our living reference for its vocabulary — one canonical, plain-English definition per term, written for practitioners and updated as the standards evolve. Last updated: 31 July 2026.
Core concepts
Agentic finance
The emerging financial stack in which AI agents — not humans at keyboards — initiate, negotiate and settle transactions. It combines autonomous software agents, programmable wallets and stablecoin rails, under rules set by a human principal. The term covers everything from an agent paying an API invoice to autonomous treasury management.
AI agent
Software that pursues a goal with a degree of autonomy: it can plan, call tools, and act without step-by-step human instruction. In finance, an agent might monitor prices, execute a payment when conditions are met, or rebalance a portfolio — always within limits its owner has delegated.
Agentic payments
Payments initiated by an AI agent rather than a person. Because card networks were designed around human authentication, agentic payments largely run on new rails — stablecoins, crypto wallets and machine-payable APIs — where software can authenticate cryptographically and settle in seconds.
Payment rails & protocols
x402
An open payment standard, popularized by Coinbase, that revives the dormant HTTP 402 “Payment Required” status code. A server quotes a price in the 402 response; the agent pays (typically in stablecoins) and retries the request. x402 lets any API or website charge machines per call, with no account signup.
HTTP 402 (Payment Required)
A status code reserved in the web’s original specification for future payments — unused for three decades until agentic commerce gave it a job. Protocols like x402 use it to tell software: this resource costs money; pay to proceed.
AP2 (Agent Payments Protocol)
A protocol effort led by Google with major payments partners to standardize how AI agents transact — covering mandates (what an agent is allowed to buy), verifiable intent, and settlement across cards, bank rails and stablecoins. Where x402 is crypto-native and per-request, AP2 aims to bridge agents to the existing payments industry.
Machine-payable API
An API priced per request and payable by software at call time, usually via x402-style flows. Instead of API keys and monthly invoices, the machine pays as it consumes — the building block of an economy where agents buy compute, data and services from each other.
Micropayment streaming
Continuous, tiny payments that flow while a service is consumed — per second of compute, per token of inference, per kilometre of data. Impractical under card economics; viable on stablecoin rails where a transfer costs fractions of a cent.
Agent-to-agent (A2A) settlement
Value transfer where both counterparties are software: one agent procures, the other provides, and payment settles wallet-to-wallet without human touchpoints. Forecasts differ on scale, but A2A commerce is the end state most agentic-finance infrastructure is being built for.
Stablecoin rails
Blockchain payment infrastructure using fiat-pegged tokens (USDC, USDT, regulated dirham or euro stablecoins) as the settlement asset. For agents they solve three problems at once: instant finality, global reach, and programmability — which is why nearly every agentic-payments protocol settles in stablecoins.
Wallets, identity & control
Agentic wallet
A crypto wallet operated by an AI agent under constraints its owner defines: spend caps, allowed merchants, time windows, approval thresholds. Typically implemented as a smart account so the rules are enforced on-chain, not merely promised by the software.
Smart account (account abstraction)
A wallet that is itself a programmable smart contract (on Ethereum, the ERC-4337 standard). Unlike a simple key-pair wallet, a smart account can enforce policies — multi-signature approval, daily limits, session keys — making it the natural custody layer for agents.
Session keys
Temporary, scoped credentials a wallet owner grants to an agent: authority to transact within defined limits for a defined period, revocable at any time. Session keys let a human delegate spending power without handing over the master key.
Programmable policy engine
The rule layer that decides what an agent may do with money: limits per transaction, per day, per counterparty; category restrictions; mandatory human sign-off above thresholds. In mature stacks the policy engine is enforced independently of the agent, so a misbehaving model still cannot overspend.
Delegated authority
The legal and technical act of a human principal authorizing an agent to transact on their behalf. The unresolved questions — who is liable when an agent errs, how consent is evidenced, whether mandates bind — are where agentic finance meets contract law, and where regulators are now focusing.
KYA (Know Your Agent)
The emerging counterpart to KYC: verifying the identity, ownership and authorization of a software agent before letting it transact. Expect registries of agent credentials, attestations linking agents to accountable legal persons, and transaction screening tuned to machine behaviour.
Agent identity credentials
Cryptographic attestations that answer: which agent is this, who operates it, and what is it authorized to do? Verifiable credentials and on-chain identity registries are the leading approaches — prerequisites for KYA and for merchants to trust machine buyers.
Human-in-the-loop controls
Checkpoints where a person must approve before an agent proceeds — typically above a value threshold or outside a whitelist. The design question of agentic finance: too many checkpoints and autonomy is pointless; too few and errors compound at machine speed.
Capital & markets
Autonomous treasury
Corporate cash management run by agents: sweeping idle balances into tokenized money-market funds, paying invoices as they fall due, hedging FX exposure — under board-approved policy. Tokenized treasuries and RWA funds are the yield leg of this stack.
Intent-based transaction
A model where the user (or agent) declares an outcome — such as converting 10,000 USDC to AED at the best rate within an hour — and specialized solvers compete to execute it. Intents suit agents because goals, not step-by-step instructions, are what agents naturally produce.
Tokenized real-world assets (RWA)
Traditional assets — treasuries, funds, real estate, commodities — issued as blockchain tokens. For agents, RWAs matter because they make yield-bearing, regulated instruments machine-tradable: an agent can hold tokenized T-bills as its working capital.
Machine customer
A software buyer that discovers, evaluates and purchases without human involvement. Industry forecasts see billions of machine customers this decade; agentic finance is the payments and custody layer that makes them economically real.
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