Closing agentic banking’s trust gap, with Dr. Efi Pylarinou

AI can already find, compare, and recommend financial products. But the moment it’s asked to pay, most customers pull back, and only around one in four are ready to hand over execution. And until someone settles who’s liable when an agent gets it wrong, agentic banking will stay stuck at the checkout.

In this episode of Banking Reinvented, host Tim Rutten chats with Dr. Efi Pylarinou, founder of Pylarinou Advisory. A former Wall Street professional with a PhD in Finance, Efi tracks the agentic shift week by week, which gives her a close view of what’s actually live in production. She argues that the trust gap is banks’ biggest opportunity, because earning trust is what they’ve always done best.

The conversation includes what’s already running, from transaction foundation models to the first live agentic payments; why those payments depend on collaboration across many participants; what banks need to identify and verify the AI agents now knocking on their door; how today’s MCP connections echo the API wave of a decade ago; and why the right KPI for an agentic workflow is a safe and verified outcome.

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