Artificial intelligence is pushing financial systems toward a model where machines perform transactions at scale, raising 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 requirements become more complex. The tipping point comes when “latency, scale, complexity starts to affect 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 economics, Borden said the focus is now shifting from ability to trust. “It’s not about, can technology automate … executing a hedging strategy — it can be done. The question is: can you trust it? Can you audit and control?” he said.
Microsoft, which offers its own AI assistant in many of its products, is developing tools to manage this 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 “follows policy” when decisions are made without direct human input.
Jonathan Levin, co-founder and CEO of Chainalysis, said the crypto sector already offers a working model for automated financing. Blockchain networks process large volumes of transactions through smart contracts and software-driven wallets, creating what he described as an environment similar to agent-based systems. “We’ve been preparing for these moments well before other parts of the financial sector,” Levin said.
That experience extends to risk management. Levin pointed to efforts to track illicit funds across “thousands of different wallets” as an example of the kind of monitoring needed in a system where transactions happen at scale without direct human input.
Looking ahead, both leaders expect a mix of systems to co-exist. Levin said that “the majority of commerce in 10 years will be settled on public infrastructure,” while Borden pointed to a more integrated approach connecting public blockchains, private networks and existing rails.
“I think traditional rails will continue to exist,” Borden said, with software acting as the layer that connects them.
