Deutsche Bank and Ant Digital Technologies Publish White Paper: Agentic Payments in Wholesale Finance

According to TechFlow, on November 9, Deutsche Bank and Ant Digital Technologies jointly released the white paper “Agentic Payments in Wholesale Finance,” discussing the deployment potential of AI agents in institutional finance and the governance framework required for responsible deployment. The white paper outlines three scenarios: treasury and liquidity management, where agents can autonomously forecast liquidity gaps and surpluses, evaluate response plans, and execute internal transfers, investments, external financing, and foreign exchange operations; cross-border payment orchestration, where agents can weigh exchange rates, payment channels, and execution timing to optimize cost, speed, availability, compliance, and settlement risk; and trade finance, where agents can interpret complex trade documents, identify data discrepancies, coordinate exception handling, and generate financing or payment instructions once conditions are met and approvals are obtained. At the governance level, the two institutions advocate “bounded agentic execution” rather than full autonomy, adopting the three-layer reference architecture proposed by the IMF: intent and orchestration, controls and authorization, and settlement, separating AI reasoning from transaction execution. Supporting requirements include clear, limited, and revocable authorization limits, binding agent identities to accountable entities, and “Know Your Agent” (KYA) verification. The white paper also uses Ant Digital Technologies’ agent platform Anvita Flow as a deployment case. Sabih Behzad, Head of Digital Assets and Monetary Transformation at Deutsche Bank, noted in the foreword that the value lies not only in automated payment execution, but also in improving how decisions are made, coordinated, and controlled; the President of Ant Digital Technologies emphasized in the foreword that agents require verifiable identities, clear and revocable authorizations, and separation of decision-making, controls, and execution.

Source: TechFlow