Money20/20 Vegas 2026: Trulioo's Sumant Gandhi on Know Your Agent

Quick Summary

Identity verification has traditionally focused on confirming the existence of a human or a business. However, the rise of autonomous technology has introduced a third vector: the agent. Sumant Gandhi of Trulioo explains at Money20/20 Vegas 2026 how the industry must evolve to verify these digital entities. Through the Know Your Agent (KYA) framework, the company aims to establish trust in transactions where AI agents act on behalf of consumers and businesses.

What is the concept of Know Your Agent?

The Know Your Agent framework is designed to capture the identity of the entities behind an autonomous agent. Relying solely on human or business identity is no longer sufficient because agents make autonomous decisions. To maintain security, it is necessary to track who the agent is, who it represents, its intent, and its specific mandate. Sumant Gandhi identifies three critical points in an agentic transaction that require verification:

• The Developer: Verification of the person or platform that built the agent, distinguishing between frontier model companies and independent developers.
• The Agent: Establishing the parameters and intent provided to the agent, ensuring it operates within its authorised mandate.
• The User: Identifying the consumer or business using the agent, which often involves managing a one to many relationship where multiple people may utilise a single identified agent.

How does Trulioo address the risk of shell companies?

A significant risk in the modern financial ecosystem is the ease with which bad actors can spin up shell companies represented by agents to move money. Sumant Gandhi notes that at Trulioo, the working thesis is that fraud begins at onboarding. To combat this, the UBO Agent is specifically designed to find data in hard to find markets. This tool uses agentic capabilities to uncover connections between shell companies and their Ultimate Beneficial Owners (UBOs). By layering agent identity on top of this data, the system can better identify and block the types of fraud associated with anonymous corporate structures.

Why is explainability critical for agentic identity?

In a highly regulated industry like financial services, auditability and explainability are essential pillars. Sumant Gandhi observes that agents are not naturally good at explaining their own logic or producing perfectly consistent results. Therefore, Trulioo has built explainability into its models from the ground up rather than as an afterthought. This includes:

• Rigorous training of models and a continuous feedback loop to narrow down false positives and false negatives.
• Geographical specificity, acknowledging that a risk signal in Canada is not the same as a signal in Asia.
• Training agents to be specific about jurisdictional laws to ensure UBO information is accurately connected back to risk signals.

What should the industry do to prepare for agentic transactions?

The industry must stop treating agentic transactions as a future problem because the technology is already being used today. Sumant Gandhi argues that this is an ecosystem play, requiring cooperation between networks, issuers, and merchants to establish how agent identity is verified across the entire transaction chain. Organisations need to understand their exposure to agent initiated tasks and start building policies and regulations now. This ensures that fraud signals and identity risks are managed effectively within a regulated environment.

FF NEWS TAKE:

As AI agents move from being simple assistants to autonomous transactors, the traditional KYC and KYB frameworks are no longer exhaustive. Trulioo is correctly identifying that the "who" in a transaction now includes the code itself and the developer behind it. By formalising Know Your Agent protocols, the industry can prevent a new wave of automated fraud and ensure that the speed of AI does not outpace the necessity of regulatory oversight. This shift toward verifying the mandate and intent of digital agents represents the next major frontier in financial crime compliance.