Machine-to-machine payments to lead agentic finance: UOB

Autonomous credit decisioning is the most distant from becoming reality.

Machine-to-machine payments will be amongst the earliest large-scale deployments of agentic finance, according to UOB.

Payments for computing resources, data services, APIs, and other digital inputs are structured, repetitive, and governed by clearly defined rules, which make them well-suited for autonomous execution, UOB said in its Agentic Finance report published in October 2026.

Enterprise operations and cross-border payments are forecasted to deploy agentic finance as well, UOB’s study said, based on eight respondents from the payment space.

UOB’s report said that programmable settlement, tokenised money and continuously available payment infrastructure will improve the economics and speed of cross-border transactions.

Consumer-facing adoption is expected to emerge more gradually, whilst autonomous credit decisioning remains “the most distant opportunity,” UOB said.

“While AI is expected to play a growing role in underwriting, risk assessment and portfolio monitoring, institutions remain cautious about delegating loss-bearing decisions to autonomous systems,” UOB said.

Consumers are expected to focus on use of agentic finance in budgeting, cash flow management, and predefined savings or investment mandates, where permissions are explicitly or easily withdrawn, said UOB.

Respondents reportedly expect progress to be constrained by factors outside the payment real itself, such as liquidity availability, regulatory requirements, local market access, and fiat-to-token conversion.