Fidelity: AI agents could become a new type of participant in financial markets, with trading, lending and asset management set to be the first sectors impacted.

Beating AI News Flash: Fidelity Digital Assets’ latest research indicates AI agents are evolving from assisting financial tasks to directly engaging in financial markets. In the future, these agents may autonomously execute trades, arrange loans, manage investment portfolios, and process payments with limited human intervention. Fidelity identifies trading, lending, and asset management as the sectors likely to be impacted first. While payments boast massive transaction volumes, their low profit margins may not translate into equivalent economic value for infrastructure providers. The research also warns that the surge in AI-driven trading activity does not guarantee sustained value for all financial platforms. As AI agents independently seek lower costs and better execution across platforms, the truly competitive players will likely be those with deep liquidity, reliable data, clearing capabilities, and robust user networks. Fidelity further points out that as AI cuts the cost of financial software development, code itself may gradually become commoditized, while network effects—including liquidity, user base, trust, and regulatory compliance—will grow in importance. Additionally, large-scale autonomous trading by AI agents will spawn new inter-machine financial activities, such as purchasing computing power, data, and digital services, which will raise higher requirements for identity authentication, asset permissions, payment settlement, and auditable execution. Industry insiders believe that in the future, financial institutions will not only use AI as an internal efficiency tool, but also treat AI agents as new financial clients. Infrastructure that can deliver secure identities, real-time data, deep liquidity, and verifiable execution capabilities may emerge as a critical value-capturing layer in the AI-powered financial era.