Finance Report.
Capital that works around the clock. AI agents deciding and acting inside mandates written by people, on blockchain rails that settle in seconds. Lead author Marcus Maute; co-published with TensorX, AMINA Bank, the Solana Foundation, APEX:E3 and the Cardano Foundation.
Artificial intelligence, blockchain settlement and tokenised assets were three separate stories. They are now one system, and software can hold, allocate and move capital without waiting for a person. Accountability stays where it was. The point of enforcement moves from review after the fact to a boundary set before the agent acts: the mandate, the identity the agent carries and the rails it may use.
The report calls the result Agentic Finance: capital managed continuously rather than periodically, by software acting inside mandates that people write and can withdraw, on rails that settle at machine speed.
five things must be true.
- The asset is held by a regulated institution.Custody, fiat rails and a balance sheet that stands behind settled tokens.
- The rail settles finally and cheaply.Settlement inside the decision cycle, at a cost that makes the smallest useful payment economical.
- The reasoning runs where the institution can see it.Inference inside the jurisdiction, retaining nothing, pinned and replayable.
- The decision is attributable to the agent that made it.Orchestration that turns many narrow agents into one decision a committee can take apart.
- The agent is identifiable as acting for a legal entity.A verifiable credential naming the entity and the authority it acts under.
Autonomy inside a mandate is a control environment, and every part of it now has an owner.
Agentic Finance Report, chapter 08a guest contribution.
Each chapter carries its author's name. The chapters in blue are mine.
| # | Chapter | Author |
|---|---|---|
| FW | Build it so that you can answer for it | Tim Grant, Executive Chairman, TensorX |
| 01 | Executive Summary | Marcus Maute |
| 02 | What Is Agentic Finance? | Marcus Maute |
| 03 | The Regulated Banking Foundation | AMINA Bank |
| 04 | Why Solana Is the Execution Layer | Solana Foundation |
| 05 | Sovereign AI Infrastructure | TensorX |
| 06 | ALICE: The Orchestration Layer | APEX:E3 |
| 07 | Verifiable Identity, the Trust Layer | Cardano Foundation |
| Guest | The Attack That Never Breaks a Rule | Blindsight |
| 08 | Conclusions & Recommendations | Marcus Maute |
the framework,
the recommendations.
Chapter 02 defines the term and sets out the framework the rest of the report uses: the difference between an assistant that proposes and an agent that acts; the five agent classes a treasury will meet (treasury, yield, compliance, collateral, payments) and why each fails differently; the loop of signal, reason, decide, comply, execute and report; and the three governance tiers that decide what an agent does alone, what it proposes for a person to confirm, and what stays with people.
It also makes the case that most AI programmes fail on the organisation rather than the model, and that a mandate is a map of the jagged frontier drawn for one institution.
Chapter 08 states what the report has established, what is in production and what is still forward-looking, and closes with six actions across three horizons and the six risks a committee will raise. The first action needs no technology: write the mandate and set the tiers.
A boundary that exists only in a prompt is not a boundary.
Chapter 02The technical deployment takes weeks; the governance architecture takes months.
Chapter 02Buy the model and leave the process alone, and you get the pilot that impresses and the P&L that does not move.
Chapter 02What no supplier can deliver is the mandate itself.
Chapter 08Written by the people who run the infrastructure, each in their own name.
The figures of $4.8 trillion in addressable capital and around 200 basis points of uplift are modelled by APEX:E3, not measured. The report says so wherever they appear, and so do I.
Maute, M. (ed.), with TensorX, AMINA Bank, Solana Foundation, APEX:E3 and Cardano Foundation; guest contribution by Blindsight (2026). Agentic Finance Report: How Autonomous AI Agents Are Reconfiguring the Management, Movement and Settlement of Institutional Capital. Industry report, edition 1.0. Released at CV Summit, Zurich, 29–30 September 2026. agenticfinancereport.com
Put it
to work
The report's first recommendation is to write the mandate. I speak and brief boards on how to.
Talks and briefings →