Hong Kong Monetary Authority launches Project SAGE for AI agent governance in finance
The HKMA opened Project SAGE on November 2, 2026, to establish standards and oversight for AI agents in financial services.
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The Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) launched Project SAGE on November 2, 2026, at Hong Kong FinTech Week to support the responsible development and adoption of agentic finance in Hong Kong. SAGE stands for Securing Agentic Finance with Governance and Enablement. The authority also established an Agentic Finance Expert Group, which includes financial institutions, technology service providers, professional service firms, and academics.
The project covers four areas. The first is market development and use-case exploration, where industry participants test agentic finance use cases and discuss practical implementation with the HKMA. The authority identified consumer-facing commerce, everyday payments, business uses such as procurement and treasury management, and machine-to-machine payments for digital services as potential areas.
The second area is agent identity. The HKMA said it will explore methods to verify an AI agent’s identity and the authority delegated to it, including Know Your Agent practices and authentication mechanisms. This extends customer checks banks already conduct to software acting on behalf of individuals or companies, addressing which agent is acting, on whose authority, and within what limits.
The third area is interoperability, where the authority will facilitate industry discussions on standards and protocols for secure interactions across the agentic finance ecosystem. The fourth covers legal and regulatory questions, including governance arrangements, liability, and consumer protection.
Eddie Yue, Chief Executive of the HKMA, said, “Agentic finance has the potential to transform how financial services are delivered and utilised.” Yue added that the initiatives aim to encourage innovation while ensuring agentic finance serves users’ interests and safeguards financial stability.
The HKMA said agentic AI technologies are maturing and that the financial industry is moving beyond internal adoption to explore how AI agents can make financial services more efficient and secure. It added that the associated risks and challenges need to be properly addressed.