Banking has spent its history building disciplines that answer one question: who is this party, and what is the institution's basis for trusting them? Know Your Customer. Know Your Business. AML. Third-party risk management. Each was built when an institution realized it lacked a framework for a participant that had quietly become part of its operating reality.
That moment is here again. AI agents are no longer tools the institution picks up and puts down. They are participants in the workflow, carrying role, authority, dependence, and the power to shape customer outcomes, capital decisions, and supervisory standing. The institution that treats them as software will discover, often during an examination, that its existing frameworks do not reach.
Know Your Agent is the framework that does. Drawing on years of sponsor-banking work, payments and core infrastructure experience across credit unions and the largest U.S. bank, and conversations with regulators and chief risk officers, Stephen Bishop and Tony del Fierro lay out a discipline institutions can apply now. With a foreword by Syed M. Raza, former Acting Chief Innovation Officer of the OCC, the book moves from diagnosis to framework to practice to the future of supervision. It is opinionated, specific, and built to be used, written for chief risk officers, boards, compliance officers, and the people who will answer when the examiner asks the question every examiner is going to ask.
