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For something launched in November, the Model Context Protocol (MCP) has begun amassing a large number of users, all but guaranteeing the mass adoption needed to make it an industry standard.
But there is a subset of enterprises that are not joining the hype for now: regulated industries, especially financial institutions.
Banks and other enterprises offering access to loans and financial solutions are not strangers to AI. Many have been pioneers in machine learning and algorithms, even playing an essential role in making the idea of investing using robots extremely popular. However, it doesn’t mean financial services companies want to jump into the MCP and Agent2Agent (A2A) bandwagon immediately.
While many regulated companies, such as banks, financial institutions, and hospitals, have begun experimenting with AI agents, these are typically internal agents. Regulated companies do have APIs. Still, so much of the integration these companies undertake has taken years of vetting to ensure compliance and safety.
“It’s very early days in a quickly accelerating domain, but there are some fundamental building blocks that are missing, at least as standards or best practices related to interoperability and communication,” said Sean Neville, cofounder of Catena Labs. “In the early days of the web, there was no e-commerce because there was no HTTPS, and no way to transact securely, so you can’t build Amazon. You need these basic building blocks in place, and now those building blocks on the web exist, and we don’t even think about them.”
Increasingly, enterprises and AI platform providers are establishing MCP servers as they develop multi-agent systems that interact with agents from external sources. MCP provides the ability to identify an agent, allowing a server to determine the tools and data it has access to. However, many financial institutions want more assurance that they can control the integration and ensure only approved tasks, tools, and information are shared.
John Waldron, senior vice president at Elavon, a subsidiary of U.S. Bank, told VentureBeat in an interview that while they are exploring the use of MCP, there are a lot of questions around the standard.
“There are not a lot of standard solutions emerging, so we are still exploring a lot of ways to do that, including maybe doing that connection without an MCP exchange if the agent technology is common between the two and it’s just two different domains,” Waldron said. “But, what is the traceability of the data exchange without another exposure in that message? A lot of what’s happening within MCP evaluation right now is figuring out if the protocol is just handling the exchange and doesn’t provide any further risk leakage. If it is, then it’s a viable path we’ll explore for handling that exchange.”
Models and agents are different
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