Over the past year, AI has inspired a wave of new products across the financial services landscape. This is often called “autonomous finance,” describing agents that bring intelligence into financial tools for the first time.

These agents can analyze contracts, draft invoices, categorize transactions and surface insights that once took hours to compile.

But this is just the beginning. It’s the era of agents without agency.

Today’s financial agents are co-pilots, not self-driving systems. They can think, analyze and predict, but they remain limited when it comes to executing payments, transfers and financial workflows.

The end state of self-driving finance is first-to-last-mile execution, where agentic insight turns into agentic action: payments sent, funds reallocated and workflows completed.

The gap between today’s co-pilots and self-driving finance comes down to two factors.

Two Roadblocks for Self-Driving Finance

1. AI Is Probabilistic

AI is probabilistic by nature. In many domains, that variability can be interesting. It might spark a new idea, reveal a pattern you missed or inspire a better answer. But that approach collapses the moment money is involved.

If an agent handling bill pay, treasury operations or B2B payments gets something wrong, that’s not interesting. That’s a headline.

Probabilistic intelligence needs deterministic execution.

2. Fragmented Rails

Autonomous finance built on traditional rails is constrained by the need to operate across three disconnected systems.

Policies live in software.
Accounts are at the bank.
Settlement is on slow, fragmented rails.

Agents can reason across layers using APIs and heuristics, but they can’t execute across them deterministically. 

Intelligence Isn’t The Bottleneck. The Rails Are.

Consider autonomous cars. We built autonomous systems capable of perceiving, planning, and reacting better than humans and then placed them on roads built for human drivers. We’ve seen huge improvements in assisted driving, but level-5 autonomy has been pushed out far longer than predicted.

Autonomous finance faces a similar constraint.

It’s intelligence attempting to operate on rails that were never built for it. Infrastructure that was created before the internet, before blockchains, before money could think. It’s impractical to build new roads in the physical world, but finance already has them.

Stablecoins, blockchains, and programmable accounts give us infrastructure that is:

• Global

• Atomic

• Deterministic

• Programmable

For the first time, money, policy, and settlement can live on the same programmable surface. A system uniquely suited for autonomous finance.

This isn’t replacing co-pilots. It’s giving them a path to autonomy.

Bringing Self-Driving Finance to Altitude.

At Squads, our products are native to these new rails. 

• Solana is the foundation for execution and settlement.

• Stablecoins are the asset.

• Grid is the programmable surface for deterministic, non-custodial execution.

Because these components work together at the execution layer, we can move from intelligent workflows to autonomous ones. Altitude, our business account for stablecoin financial services, will deliver self-driving finance to every global business.

Powered by Grid Smart Transactions, Altitude will enable agentic workflows such as:

• Agentic bill pay that checks vendor identity, amount, and policy criteria using whitelists for trusted counterparties.

• Scheduled payments that are approved and executed automatically on the designated date.

• Treasury actions that allocate idle cash into diversified yield strategies with automatic withdrawals before obligations are due.

• Automated swaps and FX transfers that rebalance sub-accounts and convert assets based on thresholds and upcoming obligations.

• Intelligent actions that observe recurring financial behavior and autonomously execute the appropriate workflow within defined policy limits.

Your CFO defines the parameters and Altitude runs autonomously within them, completing workflows from the first-to-last mile.

Intelligence in Motion

We’ve spent the last five years building on stablecoin rails because we’ve seen how they enable better financial services for individuals, businesses and developers.

Self-driving finance wasn’t the original target. It emerged as the natural extension of building on rails uniquely suited for it. Now we’re bringing these workflows into our products to make them faster, more reliable and easier to use.

This is the next era of financial products. Intelligence in motion.