PBOC Vice Governor Lu Lei: Agent Payment Responsibility Boundaries Must Not Be Blurred; Self-Discipline Convention to Be Issued

TechFlow reports that on August 31, according to Mobile Payment Network, Lu Lei, Member of the Party Committee and Vice Governor of the People's Bank of China, stated at the 15th China Payment and Clearing Forum that agent payments must not blur the liability boundaries between consumers, participating institutions, and algorithmic systems. Lu Lei noted that payment is essentially a transfer of fund ownership, which objectively necessitates predictable transaction outcomes, clearly defined liabilities, and fully traceable trails. Given the stochastic nature of outputs and insufficient logical transparency inherent in large models and autonomous agents, blindly or excessively delegating transaction decision-making authority to agents would undermine the trust foundation of financial transactions. Since current payment industry governance rules and dispute resolution mechanisms are constructed around the premise of humans as the ultimate transaction decision-makers, the new model of agent-initiated or agent-assisted transactions readily obscures liability boundaries, necessitating the optimization and enhancement of existing governance frameworks.

Addressing the lack of compatibility in agreements and standards within the agent payment domain, Lu Lei stressed that protocol disputes are fundamentally battles over business rules and technical standards, as well as struggles for dominance in the artificial intelligence era. The PBOC will continue to intensify tracking and research on technological innovations, particularly agent payments, and will guide the Payment Clearing Association to capitalize on its industry self-regulation strengths. Following extensive consultation, the association has drafted and issued the Self-Discipline Convention on Agent Payment Applications, with subsequent efforts focused on harmonizing protocols and standards and innovating risk governance frameworks. Lu Lei outlined three key expectations for market participants: proactively embrace and implement the industry self-discipline convention, maintain payment security and risk prevention as the bottom line, and anchor efforts on consumer rights protection; continuously monitor global and domestic advancements in frontier technologies like large models and autonomous agents, while strengthening technological reserves and application capabilities; prioritize rules and standards, enhance coordination and interoperability across diverse protocols and standards, and collaborate with regulators to advance the development of an underlying protocol and technical standards architecture for agent payments.