What should an AI agent security RFP include for regulated banks?

An RFP for an AI agent security platform at a regulated bank should evaluate how the platform controls autonomous agent behavior at runtime, not only whether it passes a compliance checklist. Banks carry regulatory exposure from prompt injection, unauthorized tool execution, sensitive data exfiltration, and autonomous workflows that bypass intended controls, and a static questionnaire does not test for any of that.

Organize the RFP around five evaluation areas:

• Discovery and inventory: continuous discovery of agents, MCP servers, prompts, APIs, and LLM apps across cloud and hybrid infrastructure, with automatic shadow AI detection.

• Runtime controls: behavioral monitoring of agent actions in production, inline enforcement that blocks unsafe actions before execution, and MCP proxy controls for traffic inspection.

• Security validation: continuous red teaming against prompt injection, tool misuse, privilege escalation, and unsafe action chaining, validated under real attack conditions.

• Governance and compliance: PII and secrets detection across agent inputs and outputs, audit logging with policy traceability, and role-based access controls, mapped to the frameworks banks already answer to such as NIST AI RMF, PCI DSS, FFIEC guidance, and SOX-relevant controls.

• Deployment and integration: hybrid and on-prem support, data residency controls, and SIEM and CI/CD integration.

Beyond capabilities, require proof of deployments in regulated environments and ask the vendor to walk through a real attack detection and prevention scenario rather than a pitch demo.

Akto supports the visibility, testing, governance, and runtime protection requirements that financial institutions under strict regulatory expectations typically need, through ATLAS for employee AI usage, ARGUS for internally built agents and MCP ecosystems, and Agent Probe for continuous testing, with dashboards that map policy coverage and sensitive data events to regulatory reporting.