LexisNexis Risk Solutions launches Know Your Agent fraud layer

As agentic traffic surges 750% in six months, risk intelligence is extending to cover AI agents executing financial transactions.

By Disrupts Editorial Team Fri, 13 November 2026 AI level 2 of 5

AI level 2 of 5: drafted by our AI editorial assistant from the company's announcement; fact-checked, edited and signed off by Mark Walker, Editorial Director. What the levels mean

A large curved video wall, composed of multiple screens displaying blue and green data and graphs, illuminates a control room, with two blurry laptops visible on a white desk in the foreground.

LexisNexis Risk Solutions has launched Know Your Agent (KYA), a new intelligence layer that folds AI-agent activity into the same risk-decisioning workflows organisations already use to assess human and automated digital interactions. The move marks a significant extension of identity and fraud-prevention infrastructure into what the company describes as the agentic economy, a moment when AI agents are shifting from consumer curiosity to mainstream transactional participant.

The company's own data gives a sense of the velocity. Its Digital Identity Network processed more than 116 billion digital transactions globally in 2025 and detected 4.9 billion automated bot attacks during that period, a 59% year-on-year increase. More strikingly, agentic traffic, interactions attributable to AI agents acting on behalf of people or businesses, grew by more than 750% in the first half of 2026 alone. The implication for risk teams is straightforward: a new class of digital actor is entering production systems faster than most compliance and fraud functions have had time to adapt.

Beyond detection: the authorisation problem

Simple agent detection, the company argues, is only the entry point. The harder questions are contextual: who or what does the agent represent, has it been authorised to perform the specific action it is attempting, and does the broader pattern of its behaviour fit that authority? Those questions become more complex when control passes back and forth between a human and an agent within a single digital session.

KYA addresses this by embedding agent-identity signals into the established risk-decisioning stack rather than treating agentic activity as a parallel problem. Organisations can then apply granular, context-aware responses, allow, authenticate, review or reject, rather than a binary trust/block posture. The company notes that a global financial institution has already used the detection capability to flag agentic activity and prevent it from executing sensitive transactions, though no further detail is provided.

"Agentic commerce is moving quickly from experimentation into the mainstream," said Grayson Clarke, chief commercial officer at LexisNexis Risk Solutions. "Some businesses are enabling agents to transact on consumers' behalf, while others are restricting their activities, and many are still determining the right approach."

Convergence pressure on financial and retail infrastructure

The broader strategic significance of KYA extends well beyond fraud prevention as a product category. As agentic AI becomes embedded in consumer commerce, personal shopping agents, automated payment authorisations, AI-driven account management, the attack surface for authorised push payment fraud and account takeover expands in kind. Malicious agents, the company warns, can learn dynamically from failed attempts, making each subsequent attack more targeted.

For the financial sector, this creates a compliance and operational design question that sits squarely at the intersection of AI capability and regulatory expectation. European regulators are already grappling with accountability frameworks for AI-driven decisions under the EU AI Act; agentic transactions that move money on behalf of consumers add a new layer of ambiguity around consent, liability and audit trail. Any institution processing high volumes of agentic transactions will need to demonstrate it can distinguish legitimate agent-driven activity from fraud at the decisioning layer, not merely at the network perimeter.

The retail and e-commerce sector faces a parallel challenge. Personal shopping agents are forecast to accelerate online transaction volumes significantly, but they also create new vectors for credential misuse, loyalty-point manipulation and returns fraud. The infrastructure LexisNexis Risk Solutions operates, connecting identity, device, behavioural and network signals at a reported global scale, is well positioned as a bottleneck through which agentic commerce must pass. How that positioning translates into pricing power, and whether challenger identity platforms scale to compete, is likely to become a defining capital-allocation question in fintech and risk-tech through 2027.