Equals Money opens MCP server, but no payments by AI

Equals Money's decision sits at the intersection of two trends the interview highlights. MCP servers have become a standard way for fintech companies to let customers' AI tools reach their data, but in payments, a misbehaving agent does not merely leak information — it moves money. That difference raises the bar for how agents are identified, logged and stopped, and it is why identity providers such as Okta are adding controls like runtime enforcement and a wider kill switch for AI agents.

Simcox's answer is to treat agents less as software features and more as identities. He noted that as a financial services business, Equals has always had to audit everything its staff do, so agents should not only be treated like a human but should have their own identity and their own access. The company already uses agents in customer-facing roles, and Simcox estimated that AI now writes about 92% of its code, which is what makes the ability to revoke that access essential rather than theoretical.

The practical gap is automation. Equals can cancel agent tokens today, but Simcox described the process as manual, while Okta's Agent Gateway kill switch is designed to revoke every active token held by a compromised agent. Whether Equals closes that gap by adopting such automated detection — rather than relying on staff to notice and react — is likely to determine how much customer-facing agent access it can safely allow.