Ninth Wave, the open finance platform that connects financial institutions with the applications their customers use, introduced the Ninth Wave Agentic Control Layer, a framework for governing AI access to financial account data, and announced early-access availability of an MCP server as an access channel within that framework.

"Banks need a practical way to let AI serve their customers while keeping control over access to financial information,” said George Anderson, Founder and CEO of Ninth Wave. “The questions are straightforward: Who does the agent represent? What is it allowed to see? Does that permission still apply? Our Agentic Control Layer is designed to make those checks part of how financial data is accessed.

Designed for financial institutions of all sizes, the framework will support AI assistants that help customers understand spending, forecast cash flow, and check balances through permissioned API access.

AI agents are moving beyond answering questions to performing tasks on behalf of consumers and businesses. Financial institutions need visibility into those agents and control over the data they can access. The Agentic Control Layer gives institutions a governed access path for approved agents.

HOW IT WORKS

• Know your agent. Every agent is tied to a registered, accountable operator before it can connect.
• Consent on every request. The customer approves which accounts and data an agent may use, for what purpose and for how long. That consent is checked on each call, not once per session, and revocation takes effect on the next request.
• Scoped tasks. Each job an agent performs is limited to consented accounts, data scopes, date ranges, and task limits.
• Minimum data. Only the fields a task needs are returned, with account numbers masked before any information reaches the AI model.
• Stop anytime. Institutions and Ninth Wave can pause an agent, an operator, or a capability.
• Full audit. Every approved and denied request is logged for review in Ninth Wave's Open Finance Console.

The first release is read-only, supporting account lists and balances, transaction history within defined date ranges, and account-holder verification. Money movement capabilities are on the roadmap. Institutions keep their own authentication, policies and execution controls; the Agentic Control Layer can narrow access but never widen it.

Because Ninth Wave already manages third-party access for the institutions it serves, the Agentic Control Layer builds on existing connections, consent, and its canonical financial data model, rather than requiring a new core integration. It supports both customer-authorized agents, where a person signs in and consents through the institution's own identity provider, and approved unattended business agents operating under a mandate the institution defines.