Access is the easy half

The pitch I hear most often right now: “We’re putting a financial advisor in everyone’s pocket.” It’s a good pitch. It’s also the easy half.

Dropping an LLM on top of a brokerage or banking API is a weekend build. The hard part starts the moment that software is allowed to touch real money on someone’s behalf. What can the agent do without asking? What must it never do? How do you prove — to a user, an auditor, a regulator — that it stayed inside the lines?

I spent four years at Citi living inside those questions on a nine-figure technology portfolio, and a year at Wiz watching what security infrastructure looks like when it has to hold at cloud scale. The lesson that stuck: in finance, the interesting engineering isn’t the feature. It’s the guarantee underneath it.

So when I look at an AI-fintech company, I mostly ignore the demo. I’m looking for the infrastructure: the permission model, the controls, the audit trail, the failure modes. That’s the part that’s hard to build, hard to copy, and — for consumers — the part that actually matters.

Access is coming. It’s the safety underneath that will decide who’s still standing in ten years.