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Equals Money opens AI data access but blocks payment instructions through MCP

Equals Money PLC is letting customer AI tools read data through its MCP server while blocking payment instructions, with only nonsensitive writes allowed. The payments company says agent identity, logging and kill switches are central to controlling the risk.

AI News Feed · 2026-09-30 08:10

James Simcox, chief operations and product officer at Equals Money, described the approach in an interview with theCUBE Research's Krista Case and co-host Rebecca Knight during a broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media's livestreaming studio. Simcox said opening an MCP server to customer AI tools is becoming standard for fintech companies, but payments raises the bar for how agents are identified, logged and stopped.

Equals already uses agents in customer-facing roles, and Simcox estimated that AI now writes about 92% of its code. That level of adoption makes agent identity and the ability to revoke access essential, he said. “Having that identity on the agent is really, really key, but also the ability to cut them off,” Simcox said. “If a human goes rogue, it's one human. If an agent goes rogue, it could be 100,000 of them at the exact same time going crazy.”

Identity providers are adding controls for that separation. Okta Inc. recently introduced runtime enforcement and a wider kill switch for AI agents, according to SiliconANGLE. Okta's Agent Gateway kill switch is designed to revoke every active token held by a compromised agent. Equals can already cancel agent tokens, but Simcox said the process is manual. The company wants detection that can act on its own. “What we really need is that automated view of going, this agent's not behaving like it's supposed to,” he said. “It's meant to be the email change guy and he's not doing that. So let's just kill everything right now.”

For a regulated payments company, Simcox said the safest path is to fold agents into the controls that already govern people. “As a financial services business, we've always had to audit everything our staff do,” Simcox said. “With agents, we also have to not only treat them like a human but [like] they've got their own identity [and like] they've got their own access.”

Equals applies the same caution to customer-controlled agents and operates as though it bears full liability for customer-side errors, Simcox said. The company reviews each flow multiple times. Customers can use AI tools from their enterprise resource planning packages or other systems, attach them to Equals' MCP server and exchange data more quickly, but they cannot instruct payments through MCP. “It's data read-only for now, or write for nonsensitive stuff,” Simcox said.

The interview was part of SiliconANGLE's and theCUBE's coverage of Okta's Oktane event. TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Oktane 2026 event.

Editor's Summary Equals Money has limited customer AI agents to reading data through its MCP server and blocked payment instructions, while allowing only nonsensitive writes. The company's operations chief said agent identity, auditability and kill switches are critical as AI adoption grows. The case shows payments firms treating AI agents as identities that require stronger controls than ordinary data integrations.