Who's Liable When AI Agents Make Payments? | Abril Benhumea

Lovely listener, share with us your thoughts! An AI agent books your flight, stays inside the budget you gave it, and pays for the wrong date. Who is responsible? Abril Benhumea, fintech and payments executive and co-founder of Passport, walks through what has to happen between an agent deciding to buy and the money actually moving. In this episode, Abril explains how Passport worked as an interoperability and orchestration layer on top of a bank's own infrastructure, and how real-time payment systems settle and reconcile differently from batch systems like ACH. She splits an agent payment into three layers (decisioning, trust and execution) and argues that execution already exists while trust is still being built: how a bank knows who an agent represents and what it was allowed to do. She also covers know your agent (KYA), the competing protocols from Google, OpenAI and Anthropic, and who stands to earn from agentic commerce as it grows. The market figures Abril mentions come from Bain & Company's research on agentic commerce: AI is under 1% of retailers' total traffic today, and Bain forecasts agentic commerce at 15 to 25% of US e-commerce sales by 2030. Key topics discussed: 0:00 Introduction 1:23 Passport as a payments orchestration layer 3:25 Real-time vs batch payment reconciliation 6:23 Why trust is missing in agentic commerce 13:24 Decisioning, trust and execution explained 19:38 What breaks first when agents are the payer 22:25 Google, OpenAI and the orchestration opportunity 25:10 How soon agentic payments go mainstream 27:56 Market size and where the revenue flows 32:38 Closing thoughts and open questions Abril Benhumea is a fintech and payments executive and co-founder of Passport, where she helped build open banking and real-time payments infrastructure connecting financial institutions and fintechs across the Americas. Her career spans payments infrastructure, banking-as-a-service, cross-border payments and financial partnerships, including roles at Synapse and Veem, and today her focus is the infrastructure behind agentic commerce. Connect with Abril Benhumea on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/abril-benhumea 🎙️ Subscribe for weekly episodes on fintech, AI, and innovation 🌐 Website: https://curiositycodepodcast.com/ 📱 Follow on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexkhomyakov/ 🎧 Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4ePKf2qCLzcKATS7o6w2U5 🍎 Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id1797349967 This conversation explores agentic commerce, open banking, real-time payments infrastructure and the future of payments orchestration as AI agents begin transacting on behalf of people. If you're building in fintech, banking-as-a-service or payments infrastructure, this episode maps out where the agentic payments market is heading and what institutions need to prepare for. 🎙️ Subscribe for weekly episodes on fintech, AI, and innovation 🌐 Website: https://curiositycodepodcast.com/ 📱 Follow on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/akhomyakov/ 🎧 Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/curiosity-code 🍎 Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/the-curiosity-code-podcast/id1748596092