Credit Vouched for quickly identifying the need for agent verification before agentic commerce was even talked about. Now that everyone is talking about it, CEO Peter Horadan says Vouched’s Agent Checkpoint addresses security concerns that could prevent agentic commerce from fulfilling its potential.
Agent Checkpoint is part of a suite that also includes MCP-I (Model Context Protocol – Identity) It’s built on Anthropic’s open-source Model Context Protocol, and establishes open standards for agent identity and delegation. Know That AI is a public registry for trusted AI agents. Identiclaw allows autonomous agents to act under limited permissions with full audit trails.
Horadan is well-prepared for the challenge. For most of the 1990s, he was a product unit manager at Microsoft and founded its Internet Finance Server Toolkit that enables banks and brokerages to deploy their consumer transactional web sites. It was sold to several major institutions.
Next was a stint at Corillian where he created an early online banking platform that was sold to 300 financial institutions. Corillian raised $32 million in an IPO and was acquired by Checktree for $245 million before becoming part of Fiserv. In later roles, Horadan led the creation of corporate expense and web-based sales tax and transactional tax calculation and compliance solutions.
Vouched sees identity as the next front for automation. Much like driver’s licenses in our wallets and purses, we will soon have digital IDs in our phones that simplify our online activity.
And as that online activity increasingly includes software agents, those agents will need their own unique IDs if they are to be trusted to operate on your behalf.
“We saw that coming,” Horadan said, adding Vouched began working on this in 2024. “We built our platform for it and we’re very excited.”
Why agentic identity verification is crucial
Horadan said the future is one where agentic AI will help humanity with a range of tasks, from mundane work details to ordering groceries and completed income tax filings. The minutes and hours saved will quickly add up.
For that to happen, agents must be allowed access to email accounts, banking and e-commerce sites. But those sites won’t just let anyone on there.
Currently, the method is giving an agent your username and password; that makes you and the agent inseparable, and that opens a host of issues. Is the agent reliable? Is the business protected against fraud even if the human the agent is supposedly acting for has been duped?
Permission must be clear so responsibility is clear. The detail has to be minute and auditable; permission revocable.
“With the standards we have today, none of these are possible,” Horadan said. “One of the ways I like to think about it is we’re rewriting the CISO playbook. We’re in a new chapter of what to do about agents, and it’s blank.”
Vouched is filling the pages. Auditing is based on reputation and Know That AI. Clients send reports on the agent’s behalf. Over time, a body of evidence is developed and reliability is quantified. Horadan said it’s based on spam detection systems.
How do legacy system operators catch up? Education and communication are keys. Horadan speaks often with CISOs and identifies issues with their systems. That’s an important step for the many companies that don’t know what they don’t know.
Horadan likens it to the late 1990s when banks developed websites so account holders could see data. There was soon demand to download that information for accounting, which Yodlee capitalized on. Then banks grew concerned about an external source having access to millions of passwords.
This adds a new wrinkle to security. Horadan said it used to be simple: let humans in, keep bots out. That’s no longer true.
It’s common in fintech for the excitement over a new technology to propel development further and faster, with security usually addressed later. But the safe window to address that and avert disaster is shrinking, AI systems are hacking each other. Agentic systems were used at scale last Christmas. It’s time to act.
“OpenClaw has more GitHub stars than any other project,” Horadan said. “It has more than Linux and that’s in the last three or four months.”
Horadan said agentic AI will revolutionize many careers. His own co-workers tell him AI makes concepts they could only dream about now possible.
“I have no problem in saying I believe that the introduction of human intelligences will be as profound for humanity as the introduction of the PC and the introduction of the Internet,” Horadan said.