As artificial intelligence becomes deeply woven into financial services, from credit scoring algorithms to AI-powered advisors, the sector is entering a period of both exponential opportunity and existential risk. At the heart of this evolution lies a deceptively simple question: Who—or what—is acting on behalf of a person? When transactions are triggered by bots, contracts signed by digital agents, or fraud attempted by synthetic identities, traditional definitions of identity, consent, and trust begin to unravel.

This is where the concept of digital personhood becomes indispensable.

The Rise of AI Agents in Finance

AI agents are already reshaping the financial landscape. From chatbots managing customer service queries to algorithmic traders executing millions of trades in milliseconds, the industry is moving toward an environment where machines routinely act in ways that once required human agency.

As AI matures into decision-making roles (issuing loans, recommending investments, or flagging fraud) financial institutions face a growing accountability gap. Who takes responsibility when an AI misfires? What rights does a human have when their financial profile is misrepresented or manipulated by an algorithm they never met?

Without clear frameworks for identifying and protecting the human behind every digital interaction, the financial system risks becoming a black box - efficient, yes, but unaccountable and open to abuse.

Why Personhood is the Missing Layer

Digital personhood is not about assigning rights to machines. It's about anchoring every digital action (especially those mediated by AI) to a verifiable, sovereign, and human-centredidentity.

In the financial sector, this has profound implications:

Consent and compliance: A personhood credential creates a verifiable audit trail of who consented to what and when. This is especially vital under POPIA, GDPR, and financial KYC/AML regulations.

Fraud prevention: Anchoring AI transactions to verified human identities helps combat synthetic identity fraud, a rapidly growing threat where criminals use fake or blended data to create convincing “people” that trick systems.

Digital signatures and contracts: As AI systems generate and execute contracts autonomously, personhood credentials ensure these actions remain legally binding and attributable to a real person.

Financial inclusion: By enabling even non-digital or low-digital users to own portable, sovereign digital identities, personhood frameworks help expand access to financial tools without increasing risk.

From Superapps to Superagents

As the recent LinkedIn commentary by Jamie Smith notes, the future of digital infrastructure is not just about platforms, but agents. AI will not merely assist, it will represent. When it does, institutions must know who the agent is acting for.

That’s the challenge and promise of personhood credentials: creating a universally verifiable, privacy-respecting way to bind digital activity back to a real person - without requiring invasive surveillance or platform monopolies.

Building Ethical AI Finance, One Identity at a Time

For the financial sector, embracing personhood is about more than compliance; it’s about restoring human trust in a system increasingly run by machines. As AI-driven services scale, we must build guardrails that ensure fairness, transparency, and accountability remain at the core of digital finance.

This means rethinking how we design identity, consent, and authority in a world of intelligent agents. Digital identity is no longer just a security layer — it’s the foundation of ethical, human-centred AI in finance: systems that prioritise trust, transparency, and individual agency.

Today, it is absolutely critical to lay a sound foundation through advanced PKI, sovereign identity frameworks, and personhood credentials that empower people, while keeping their digital interactions secure, traceable, and legally recognized… because in the future of finance, the most important asset may not be money - it may be you.

By Carrie Peter, Managing Director at Impression Signatures and Advocacy Committee Vice-Chair at the Cloud Signature Consortium