AI agents are starting to make financial decisions without a human approving every step, as such a design cant scale. In this conversation I sit down with Amna Usman Chaudhry, financial economist and frontier technology strategist, to dig into why AI governance built for a single agent breaks down frequently once multiple agents start interacting with each other.

KYC governed the customer and KYB businesses. KYA is the emerging standard to govern an individual AI agent. But what happens when several AI agents interact to produce one financial decision, and every single one of them is individually compliant? Amna identifies a gap in several multi-agent workflows which she coins as the swarm accountability gap, and she has built a framework for it - KYS, Know Your Swarm.

We get into why KYC, KYB and KYA all remain necessary but are not sufficient on their own, and what she calls delegation failure: the moment a multi-agent system produces a harmful or discriminatory outcome that cannot be traced back to any single agent.

The nuances of agentic workflows in finance, are being uncovered. Not all multi-agent workflows created Swarms. However, as we are preparing to delegate agency at scale, we need to understand swarms. This topic touches on biases, financial inclusion, and of course governance and ethics.

💎 Guest Bio: Amna Usman Chaudhry

is a financial economist and frontier technology strategist defining Autonomous Finance - the structural shift toward AI coordinated financial systems.

She is the author of KYS: Know Your Swarm (SSRN, 2026), a governance framework for multi-agent AI in regulated finance. Her work spans fintech, AI, blockchain, digital assets, financial inclusion and responsible innovation.

Amna is a graduate level lecturer in frontier finance and emerging technologies, and serves on boards and advisory councils across fintech, technology and responsible innovation. She is a UNESCO Women4EthicalAI Expert and has twice been listed on the Innovate Finance Women in FinTech Powerlist.

She has spoken at and contributed to United Nations convenings and multi-stakeholder platforms on algorithmic accountability, digital assets, AI governance, and the future of Autonomous Finance. She also writes Autonomous Finance, a Substack publication on what happens when money starts to think for itself.