Sibos 2025: APIs & agentic AI

The rise of agentic artificial intelligence is leading to a rethink in how one financial services group is approaching the design and implication of application programming interfaces, or APIs.

Speaking on video ahead of the Sibos financial services conference in September, ANZ’s Head of Technology — Payment Services and Digital Assets, David Buckthought, said the rate of change driven by technology like agentic AI was leading to a reassessment of the bank’s API thinking.

That means looking at how the systems are built, what kind of information is securely shared, and who the intended audience of the programs are, he said.

“It used to be driven by developers and humans at large,” Buckthought said. “We're now starting to need to make sure that we're building out our service catalogue in a way that they're discoverable [by] agents, and they're also able to be used by the agents, and selected by a non-human.”

Buckthought made the comments in conversation with Carl Garrett, Head of Global Cross-border Payments at ANZ Institutional. You can watch the video below to find out more.

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APIs are bridging programs which allow separate applications to work together, and are critical for creating interoperability between the system of large banks like ANZ and those of their customers.

Agentic AI sees programs — or ‘agents’ — operate on behalf of consumers and businesses to find, recommend and complete transactions for products and services, simplifying the purchasing process.

A lot of work will be required to finesse the details, Buckthought said. Designing APIs for an agent to call a service is one thing, but there’s a lot of questions to be answered in the meantime.

“How do you ensure the identity?” Buckthought said. “How do you ensure the entitlements? And how do you ensure that that agent's actually acting on behalf of the consumer, within the parameters that have been set?

“I think this is where we're going to start to see the complexity come.”