HSBC and Ant Digital Test AI Agents Paying for Services With Tokenised Deposits

HSBC and Ant Digital Technologies announced on October 9, 2026 a technical test showing that an artificial intelligence agent can locate a digital service, use it and manage payment for it, with blockchain technology handling the settlement layer. The exercise is a technological verification rather than a product available to customers, the two companies said.

The test combined three elements: HSBC's Tokenised Deposit Service, Ant Digital's Anvita Flow infrastructure, and the Jovay Testnet, a layer-two blockchain test environment. Transaction sizes used in the exercise were usually less than two dollars, and no aggregate transaction volume or other financial figures were disclosed.

How the architecture worked

HSBC's contribution centred on providing tokenised deposits, settlement capabilities, and real-time risk controls, delivered through an interface based on the Model Context Protocol. Ant Digital's Anvita Flow supplied the infrastructure that allows AI agents to discover services, access them, and coordinate payment between the agent and the service provider.

Put together, the setup let an AI agent search for a digital service, engage with it, and settle payment using tokenised bank deposits on the Jovay Testnet, without a human manually processing the transaction at each step.

Part of a wider pattern among banks

The HSBC and Ant Digital test is not an isolated effort. Santander ran a test in March 2026 of payments initiated by AI agents using Mastercard's Agent Pay infrastructure. Sygnum and CaixaBank have also developed experiences related to AI-initiated financial operations.

Taken together, these initiatives point to a cluster of banks and technology firms probing whether autonomous AI agents can be trusted to carry out financial transactions on behalf of users, using tokenisation and blockchain rails to record and settle those transactions. For now, each of these efforts remains confined to testing environments rather than live commercial deployment.

HSBC and Ant Digital did not set out a timeline for moving beyond the current verification stage, and neither company characterised the test as a precursor to an imminent commercial launch.