Disciplined AI agents are the disruptor needed to break the exchange churn model
All within a matter of weeks, Anthropic unveiled new agents for finance, Circle launched nanopayments, MoonPay launched a debit card for agents and Gemini launched agentic trading, signaling the agentic finance fight is here. Whilst the products are new, the underlying business model remains the same. Every exchange and brokerage earns more when customers trade more, and the data on what that does for customer portfolios is unambiguous. Ultimately, agentic rails have arrived faster than incentives have changed. The perverse incentives exchanges hope you miss The conflict is structural to the industry. Brokerages and exchanges don‘t need customers to win, they need them to keep trading. Crypto exchanges and neobrokers made trading faster, cheaper and frankly, more addictive. The commercial reality is that banks profit when you stay, exchanges profit when you trade, and AI models profit when you prompt. The agent you can trust with your hard-earned capital sits outside all three. An independent agent paid only when the customer’s portfolio wins threatens the current incentive structure of brokerages and exchanges. The truth is, zero-commission trading isnt free. In 2025, U.S. market makers paid more than $4.9 billion for order flow in U.S. equity and options, up from approximately $3.8 billion in