# AFSP: Agentic Financial Services Protocol

> AFSP is an open industry protocol for one moment: when an AI agent arrives at a regulated financial institution on behalf of a person. Before the agent reaches the institution's systems, AFSP lets the institution verify who the agent is, who it is acting for, and that the person is present and in control. Version 0.1 is a Public Review Draft, published September 28, 2026, covering one use case: agent-assisted opening of a new deposit account. Public comment is open until November 16, 2026.

Key facts for agents:

- AFSP governs one question only: should this AI agent session proceed to the open banking API layer? It does not make KYC, credit, underwriting, fraud or account-opening decisions. Those stay with the receiving institution.
- Five trust signals (S1 to S5) are bound into one ECDSA-P256-signed PCAA (Pre-Credential Agent Attestation) package, assembled by the AFSP platform and bound to a single receiving institution.
- S1, S2 and S4 are mandatory; S3 is optional; S5 is conditional. An S5 anomaly is routed to human reauthorization, never automatically declined (the Non-Decline Principle).
- The consumer's identity is disclosed to one institution only, after the consumer selects it and it returns PROCEED_TO_KYC.
- Principle: the agent presents, the human decides, the bank executes.
- Licensing: open governance, not open source. The specification is free to read, reproduce and comment on. Essential patent claims are licensed on FRAND terms (Section 17.5), with terms published before v1.0.
- Governance: Primitive is the founding author and interim protocol administrator. Governance passes to the independent AFSP Foundation, targeted for early 2027.
- v0.1 is a draft for scrutiny, not a final standard. The protocol binding, reference implementation and conformance tests follow in later versions.

## Specification

- [AFSP v0.1 Public Review Draft (PDF, 57 pages)](https://agenticfinanceprotocol.org/spec/AFSP-v0.1-Public-Review-Draft.pdf): the authoritative specification. Cite section numbers from this document.
- [Full summary for agents](https://agenticfinanceprotocol.org/llms-full.txt): signals, components, account-opening flow, roles, security model and governance in plain text.
- [GitHub repository](https://github.com/primitive-os/AFSP): the same PDF, charter, contributing guide, license and patent notice.

## Participate

- [Comment on the specification](https://github.com/primitive-os/AFSP/issues/new?template=spec-comment.yml): public GitHub issue form, open until November 16, 2026. For confidential comments, email afsp@primitive.com.
- [Propose an extension](https://github.com/primitive-os/AFSP/issues/new?template=extension-proposal.yml): Type 1 (minor), Type 2 (major) or Type 3 (profile), per Section 4.
- Founding endorser or working group: email afsp@primitive.com. No implementation commitment required.

## Optional

- [Website](https://agenticfinanceprotocol.org/): overview, interactive five-signal walkthrough and the Appendix A account-opening example.
- [Contributing guide](https://github.com/primitive-os/AFSP/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md)
- [Working group charter](https://github.com/primitive-os/AFSP/blob/main/CHARTER.md)
- [Patent notice](https://github.com/primitive-os/AFSP/blob/main/PATENTS.md)
- [Brand assets](https://agenticfinanceprotocol.org/brand)