FCA's 147-page review backs stablecoins for AI agent settlement

The UK's financial regulator has positioned stablecoins and tokenized deposits as essential infrastructure for the coming wave of autonomous AI agents in finance.

The UK Financial Conduct Authority published a 147-page review on July 6 recommending that stablecoins and tokenized bank deposits serve as settlement infrastructure for autonomous AI agents, marking the first major regulatory blueprint for agentic finance.

"Firms are moving from systems that recommend actions to systems empowered and trained to take them, and consumers will soon gain agents that act on their behalf," Sheldon Mills, executive director at the FCA and author of the review, said in the report's foreword.

The Mills Review outlines seven recommendations including enabling "the foundations for agentic finance" and scaling the FCA's AI Lab to support model innovation. It introduces an "autonomy spectrum" where humans may eventually serve as mere observers while AI continuously manages capital. FCA research shows 20% of UK adults are already open to letting AI make autonomous financial choices, while more than 20 frontier models have been released since late 2025 alone.

The report's explicit endorsement of programmable money as a settlement layer for autonomous agents provides a significant legitimacy boost for regulated stablecoin issuers and tokenization platforms in the UK. Traditional multi-day settlement latency remains an operational bottleneck for AI-driven finance, the review notes, positioning systemic stablecoins and tokenized assets on programmable ledger networks as the friction-free alternative needed for atomic settlement without human clearance.

"You need a human on the hook"

Mills, who is leaving the FCA after eight years, told the Financial Times that managers would remain accountable for their AI models' actions. "You need a human on the hook for what they're doing," he said. The review highlights growing industry anxiety over legal accountability, noting that one CEO observed the financial sector may eventually require a "Turing test" to distinguish between human intent and autonomous algorithmic behavior in markets.

Emma Banymandhub, CEO of The Payments Association, said the review reinforces that firms should treat agentic AI as an accountability and governance issue now, while providing confidence to innovate responsibly as adoption accelerates.

What the review means for crypto infrastructure

The FCA's recommendations position the UK as a potential testbed for regulated digital asset infrastructure supporting AI-driven finance. By explicitly naming systemic stablecoins and tokenized bank deposits as necessary settlement mechanisms, the regulator has signaled a path for compliant crypto projects to integrate with traditional financial rails. The review's call for trusted agent protocols and expanded AI Lab resources suggests the FCA intends to develop a framework for approving and monitoring autonomous financial agents that operate on programmable money networks.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.