Technology and family governance
Let an AI agent prepare a payment. Who should authorise it?
Project SAGE puts agent identity and delegated authority on the financial agenda. For a family business, the practical issue is the boundary between a payment proposal, approval and execution.
An exploration programme is not a live payment mandate
The HKMA launched Project SAGE on 2 November to explore agentic-finance applications, identity, interoperability and legal and regulatory questions. Procurement and treasury management are among the potential business applications, supported by a new expert group.[1]
G70 analysis treats this as an opportunity to review payment controls. The announcement does not establish that a bank offers a particular automated payment service or settle a company’s allocation of liability. Availability, acceptable mandates and error handling still require confirmation under the relevant service terms.
Separate reading, recommending and executing
Consider a hypothetical procurement workflow. An agent reads an invoice, checks it against an order and delivery record, and recommends payment. These permissions can be separated. Access to an invoice need not include power to add a beneficiary or submit a bank instruction.
G70 suggests defining authority by action. Reading records, drafting a payment, changing a beneficiary account, approving and submitting a transaction need distinct boundaries. Combining account changes, approval and payment in one agent concentrates steps that should cross-check one another. This is a process-design proposal, not a rule already issued under SAGE.
A per-payment cap is only one boundary
A request might be duplicated or split into several payments. Controls can also specify approved beneficiaries, cumulative amounts over a period, duplicate-invoice checks and authority expiry, with exceptions assigned to named staff. A single transaction limit does not answer all of these cases.
Revocation has stages too. Stopping an agent from reading data or sending new instructions does not establish that a bank can reverse a payment already accepted or settled. A company needs to know which system implements the stop, when it takes effect and how pending instructions are identified and handled. Actual cancellation capability must be confirmed with providers.
Make the decision reconstructable
SAGE includes exploration of agent identity and delegated authority, including Know Your Agent approaches.[1] G70 analysis suggests linking an internal agent identity to the authorising person, approved scope and version effective at the time, retaining inputs, recommendations, approvals, submissions and bank responses. “The system approved it” is insufficient to reconstruct a decision.
A testable starting point is read, reconcile and draft, followed by validation of exception handling, revocation and audit records before considering broader execution rights. The test is whether each action can be bounded and traced, rather than whether the agent appears able to complete an entire payment chain.
Official and primary sources
Sources checked on 9 November 2026.
