The Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) launched Project SAGE on Nov. 2 to examine how software agents might perform financial tasks and what controls firms would need as banks explore agentic AI. It also formed an expert group with members from financial institutions, technology providers, professional services firms and academia.
The project name stands for Securing Agentic Finance with Governance and Enablement. Here, agents are software that may carry out financial tasks under authority delegated to them. The HKMA plans to study potential applications, ways to verify an agent’s identity and authority, standards that connect systems, and legal and regulatory frameworks. One question is whether a firm can confirm which agent is acting and what permissions it has; another is whether systems developed by different providers can communicate.
Possible scenarios include personal purchases and payments, corporate procurement and treasury work, and transactions between machines. The HKMA presented these as areas for study, not services it had announced as live. Its agenda puts possible uses alongside questions of delegated authority, responsibility and customer protection.
The authority describes more efficient service delivery as a potential benefit. HKMA Chief Executive Eddie Yue said agentic finance has “the potential to transform” financial services. Separately, the HKMA published a discussion paper inviting industry feedback on oversight of banks’ use of agentic AI.
In an Oct. 15 update, the HKMA said agentic AI featured in more than 60% of the round-two use cases in its generative AI sandbox. The same release raised a registry of material AI agents as a topic for a forthcoming governance discussion paper; it did not announce a registry requirement.
Project SAGE is part of the HKMA’s Fintech 2030 strategy, announced Nov. 3, 2025. The strategy’s pillars are data and payment, artificial intelligence, resilience and tokenisation.
