Setting the Stage for Boston Fintech Week 2026: Fintech that Thinks

Amit Sharma is a former treasury department official, the founder of FinClusive Capital, and is now with Fragomen, a leading global immigration law firm, who along with SICPA, is currently bringing a digital identity and trust technology orchestration platform to market. In this fireside chat, Amit and Sarah introduce many of the big themes addressed during the Fintech Sandbox Innovation Forum in 2026, starting with identity. How do you know your customer? How do you know your counterparty? How do business models and our regulatory frameworks need to change given the technological realities of today, especially in a globally interconnected financial services ecosystem that is now increasingly enabled by artificial intelligence and agents? Speakers: Amit Sharma – Fragomen, Managing Director for Digital Identity Sarah Biller – Fintech Sandbox, Co-Founder Amit and Sarah roll through all of these topics: • What happens in financial services when machines start making decisions and there are no longer humans in the loop or on either side of the transaction? • How do we ensure there’s a verified human (or entity) behind the AI agent transacting on a customer’s behalf, and ensure that agent has the authority to initiate that specific transaction at that time and only for the parameters approved? • How agentic AI is changing the economics of fraud, and the emergence of Fraud as a Service. • Rethinking proof of personhood and proof of control (for AI agents). • KYC is one thing. Banks and fintechs worry about engaging potential bots or agents. But increasingly, people need to equally know that the bank or fintech is actually legitimate too, and not an illicit agent. • The AI and agentic-enabled economy is being built by humans. It can and should reflect the ‘values’ we want that economy to reflect. • Our children are increasingly web-native, and now increasingly AI-native; financial services increasingly reflect services and the channels for their delivery in ways that are web and AI-native. What do we want the financial services ecosystem we build for them to look like?