Here is a funny AI story.
San Francisco.
A quiet night in 2024.
A parking lot near 2nd Street and Harrison.
Residents nearby heard an odd sound drifting through the air.
Not sirens. Not traffic.
A chorus of autonomous cars honking at one another in a loop.
A driverless vehicle had stopped at the entrance to the lot.
Another autonomous car pulled in behind it.
Then another.
Then another.
None were broken.
None were hacked.
They were simply confused.
Each car believed it was following the rules.
Each assumed the others were the obstacle.
So the machines honked, recalculated, waited, and honked again.
People watching from their windows saw a late-night comedy unfold.
A real-world sitcom starring robots stuck in a loop of their own logic.
Now here is a far more serious AI story.
Your bank.
A July Monday morning in 2026.
Just before market open.
Payments stall.
Reports fail to generate.
Fifteen automated processes stop in the same minute.
Your team reacts as if it is a coordinated attack.
Systems are checked.
Security is alerted.
Transactions slow down.
The board expects answers.
But the cause is something far more unsettling.
Your own agentic AI, productive and well intentioned, acted without identity or guardrails.
A single expired shared credential.
A hidden dependency.
And a cluster of automated processes all waiting on each other.
Each certain it was correct.
None able to see the big picture.
From the perspective of the AI, the two events follow the same pattern, even if their consequences could not be more different.
Autonomous systems do not know whether they are causing a harmless annoyance or a banking disruption.
They simply act.
They follow the access they are given.
Without identity, context, or boundaries, they turn small issues into systemwide failures.
That is where Manatoko Agency enters the story.
Your institution now relies on scripts, bots, schedulers, and AI driven processes that often run with:
When something fails, you may not know until customers or regulators feel the impact.
You cannot remove access you cannot identify.
You cannot audit actions that are not tied to a specific actor.
You cannot explain an incident to your board if automation has no identity.
Industry surveys indicate that a significant portion of automation failures and outages can be traced to identity and credential issues.
This is no longer an IT weakness.
It is an operational and compliance risk that grows with every new automated process.
Regulators and guidance frameworks are increasingly asking institutions to demonstrate governance over non human access, not only human access.
If your bank is at risk from its own well intentioned automation acting without identity, imagine the risk when malicious AI driven agents enter the picture.
In 2025, investigators documented a cyber espionage operation in which a state backed group used an AI system to help infiltrate about 30 organizations. Public reporting indicates that the AI carried out a large share of operational tasks, with humans supervising major decisions.
This was one of the first publicly documented cases of an AI assisted multi stage intrusion.
These threats increasingly target unattended systems rather than people. They look for automated processes with broad access but no identity or oversight.
If your bots and scripts do not have identity, they are open doors.
NIST and CISA guidance increasingly recognizes that identity and access governance must apply to non human entities such as bots, service accounts, containers, APIs, workloads, and AI based processes.
Identity now means:
If your bank manages only human identities, a large portion of your environment remains outside your security model.
In many banks, automated processes already outnumber employees or about to do so.
Industry analyses show that machine identities often exceed human identities by dozens to one, and in some environments substantially more. Independent surveys show that mismanaged machine credentials can disrupt payment systems, reporting pipelines, and customer channels.
You would never allow hundreds of employees to enter a branch with no identification.
Yet many banks allow this exact scenario for machines.
Manatoko Agency closes this gap.
Manatoko Agency gives each automated process its own identity. Imagine each bot having its own badge and keycard instead of multiple processes using the same access path.
With Manatoko Agency, each automated process can be:
This shifts automation from anonymous to accountable.
A simple conceptual flow looks like this:
Automation becomes manageable, traceable, and governed.
Before Manatoko Agency
After Manatoko Agency
By isolating automated processes, a bank could reduce multi process outages by a meaningful margin.
A payment batch stops.
Reports do not generate.
Customer systems show gaps.
Your team joins a bridge call to trace the cause.
The reason is simple.
A machine access method expired over the weekend.
It was embedded across several scripts.
They all stopped at once.
This is not a systems failure.
It is an identity failure.
Manatoko Agency makes this preventable.
Manatoko Agency uses the same foundational identity model as Manatoko VC, the privacy focused identity platform developed for regulated banking environments.
This identity foundation originated as a finalist solution in the FDIC and FinCEN digital identity tech sprint. It aligns with emerging FDIC guidance that allows institutions to rely on pre verified identity data when confirmed by the customer.
The framework supports identity reuse, revocability, portability, and compliance without storing sensitive personal data.
Manatoko VC demonstrated how institutions can govern customer identity consistently.
Manatoko Agency applies these principles to automated systems.
You gain one identity framework across human and machine actors.
By giving each automated process a distinct identity, a bank can reduce failures caused by shared access and uncontrolled automation.
By isolating automated processes, a bank could reduce multi process outages by a meaningful margin.
Audit reviews become clearer and more predictable.
A future bank CEO should be able to tell the board, “We know exactly which automated process performed which action. There is no ambiguity or blind spot.”
That is the shift from firefighting to control.
Your automation footprint is expanding.
AI driven threats are rising.
Guidance frameworks are focusing more on non human access.
Machine identities multiply quickly.
Waiting increases your exposure.
Banks that act now will be ready when the next incident requires explanations.
Banks that delay will be explaining preventable gaps.
If your automated systems do not have identity, you do not control them. That gap leads to outages, audit exposure, and avoidable risk.
Every day you wait, you gamble your reputation, risking a systems-down call that traces back to a preventable identity failure. That failure will not just hit your customers; it will land on your desk, demanding an explanation for a risk many of your peers are already working to eliminate.
You can fix this before the next incident chooses the moment for you. Send an email to agency@amberoon.com to schedule an automation identity readiness review and give every automated process an identity your institution can govern.