Agentic Fintech Needs a Data Layer It Can Trust

TL;DR. 44% of finance teams run agentic AI in 2026, up 600% from last year. Most of those agents read data they cannot independently verify. When agents act on unverified data like stale balances or off-chain records, errors compound before anyone catches them. On-chain data is verifiable, timestamped, and immutable by design, and Blockscout provides that kind of data through our AI tooling suite.

At the 15th London Business School Corporate Banking Forum, Blockscout CEO Eva Zhang joined the AI Frontier panel alongside HSBC, Deloitte UK, Corpay, and MiniMax AI. The discussion was on agentic fintech, with a focus on AI systems that don't just analyze, but act. Authorization, routing, compliance screening, fraud detection. Her message: the agents are ready, but the existing data layer needs more tolling support.

That conversation had run the same week at Money 20/20 Amsterdam, where Eva presented alongside Jon Egilsson, co-founder of Monerium, the team building regulated stablecoin infrastructure for bank rails. Their topic: compliance, privacy, and the data challenges that emerge as banks move operations on-chain.

Two conferences exploring the same thesis. The industry is building faster than the foundation underneath can hold.

The agentic moment is already here

The numbers aren't speculative. The IMF published a note this year on agents reshaping payments. FIS is building an agent-first governed environment with Anthropic. Coinbase shipped the first wallet infrastructure designed for AI agents in February with session caps, multi-party approvals, audit logs baked in.

The use cases are real and the deployments are live. They share sophisticated governance frameworks sitting on top of AI, but data sourcing is still a big issue.

Every agent in production reads data from somewhere. In most deployments, "somewhere" is a patchwork of internal databases, off-chain price feeds, CRM records, and third-party APIs. Some of it is real-time while some of it is hours or days old. Some of it has no audit trail at all.

The data problem

Humans will generally apply judgment to imperfect data. If they notice a stale timestamp, they will investigate, and flag details that don't add up.

Agents aren't so sophisticated. They take the information presented and act.

When an agent routes a payment on a stale balance, or clears a transaction from an address a human would have checked twice, the error doesn't announce itself. It compounds later, possibly surfacing in a reconciliation the next week, or a compliance audit six months out.

Trustworthy data for agents has four properties: verifiable (provable origin), timestamped (exact moment it was true), immutable (no post-hoc changes), and queryable (machine-readable at speed). On-chain data has all four by design.

What on-chain data changes

For financial institutions migrating operations on-chain (which is exactly what the Monerium stack enables), the data layer shifts fundamentally. Every transaction, every token transfer, and every contract state change becomes part of a public, timestamped, auditable record.

An AI agent querying that onchain record doesn't need to trust an intermediary. The transaction either happened on the blockchain or it didn't. There is no inbetween.

This is what the AI Frontier panel was circling around: the agents are sophisticated, the governance frameworks are getting better, but the data pipeline is still stitched together from systems that weren't built for machine-speed access.

What Blockscout provides

Blockscout indexes 100+ EVM chains and exposes that data through the Pro API — REST and JSON-RPC, updated in real time. The MCP Server connects directly to AI agent frameworks: address lookups, transaction tracing, contract inspection, with a traceable query-to-decision chain and no manual key management.

That's the data layer the LBS CBF panel was asking about: open, verifiable, and built for the pace at which agents operate.

The agents are ready. The question is whether the data they're reading deserves the trust they're placing in it.