The EU AI Act's transparency rules now apply, and banks are deploying AI agents that move money.

European banks, fintechs and insurers are moving from AI chatbots to AI agents: software that reads email, queries customer databases, triggers payments and approves or rejects claims without a person clicking each step. The EU AI Act's transparency rules (Article 50, mostly chatbot disclosure and content labelling) have applied since August. The heavier obligations for high-risk systems, including record-keeping and human oversight, were pushed back to December 2027 by the Digital Omnibus. So right now there's a gap: firms are deploying agents, and the rules that would clearly govern them aren't in force yet. Alongside GDPR Article 22 and DORA, regulators will still expect firms to explain what an automated system did and who was accountable. Some things I'd like to understand better: Most companies can log what an agent did after the fact. Is that enough for regulators, or will they expect controls that block actions before they happen? Who is accountable inside a firm when an agent makes a bad call: the vendor, the deploying team, the compliance officer? Data residency is a big issue in Europe. Will firms accept US-hosted cloud tools to oversee their agents, or will it have to run inside their own infrastructure? Is the EU approach (heavy documentation and record-keeping) going to slow deployment compared with the US and China, or will it become a trust advantage? I work in this space and want to understand how people in finance, tech, or regulation see it. Is anyone seeing real agent deployments in European firms, or is it still mostly pilots?