Building Trust and Identity for Autonomous Finance

In Episode 38 of The Exponential Show, host Mayank Singh sat down with Alex D. Scheer, CEO and Co-Founder of zkMe, during Money20/20 Asia in Bangkok for a conversation on trust, privacy, digital identity, and the future of financial infrastructure.

The conversation explored why identity verification is becoming increasingly important as finance moves toward more autonomous systems, how zkMe is building privacy-preserving identity infrastructure, and why Southeast Asia could play an important role in the next wave of financial innovation.

The episode also included a special thank you to Money20/20 Asia for having Exponential as one of the media representatives during the event, and to Midas PR for making the conversation happen and supporting the show behind the scenes.

From engineering and supply chains to digital identity

Alex’s path into entrepreneurship was not a straight line.

He began his career with a background in supply chain management and mechanical engineering, with an early interest in aerospace. He later moved into the automotive industry, working on complex supply chain optimization problems for large global manufacturing networks.

In that world, Alex worked on the mathematics and systems behind moving thousands of components across international supplier networks into assembly lines. Over time, this led him into software product management, and eventually to running a software department out of China.

Then came Covid.

Like many founders, the pandemic became a moment of reflection. Alex began thinking about whether he wanted to build something of his own. Around the same time, he was reading incoming European regulations around crypto assets, including MiCA, and noticed something important: decentralized financial services would increasingly need to meet regulatory standards if they were made available through public-facing interfaces.

That observation became the starting point for zkMe.

The problem zkMe is solving

The original idea behind zkMe was to build compliance primitives for decentralized finance.

In simple terms, the company set out to help financial services verify users without forcing them to give away unnecessary personal data. This became especially relevant in areas like KYC, AML, DeFi lending, token distribution, and other financial services where identity, eligibility, and compliance matter.

Over time, the opportunity expanded beyond Web3 compliance.

Alex now describes zkMe as building identity infrastructure for autonomous finance. That includes any situation where an algorithm, AI agent, smart contract, or automated system acts financially on behalf of a person.

This could include proving that a user is not sanctioned, verifying that they are over 18, bridging credit scores, or enabling an AI agent to understand a user’s financial context without exposing sensitive information unnecessarily.

Giving control of identity back to the user

One of the key differences in zkMe’s approach is that identity data remains under the control of the user.

In traditional identity verification, a user often submits a passport or identification document to a third-party provider. That provider then stores a copy of the document in a centralized database. This creates obvious privacy and security risks.

zkMe takes a different approach.

Instead of handing over identity data permanently, users can hold a verified digital version of their identity and selectively disclose only the information required for a specific financial service. In some cases, a service may need full KYC details. In other cases, it may only need a simple yes-or-no verification that the person is eligible to use the service.

This creates a flexible model where privacy and compliance can coexist.

Why this matters for AI agents

As agentic AI becomes a bigger part of finance, identity becomes even more important.

If an AI agent is acting on behalf of a person, it may need access to sensitive information, such as brokerage APIs, credentials, or account permissions. But giving an agent unrestricted access creates serious risks.

Alex explained that one of the biggest issues with agents today is that any information given to an agent should be treated as potentially leaked. zkMe’s technology helps address this by allowing sensitive credentials to be stored and used in secure sessions, separate from the model itself.

This means an agent can execute tasks, such as trades or financial actions, without exposing the underlying credentials more broadly.

In that sense, zkMe is not only building identity infrastructure for people. It is also building infrastructure for agents that act on behalf of people.

Southeast Asia, Hong Kong, and the rise of autonomous finance

Alex sees major opportunities emerging across Asia.

One area he highlighted is regulatory arbitrage. Some markets are moving faster than others in creating frameworks for digital assets, stablecoins, and agentic financial systems. Hong Kong, for example, has been active in creating frameworks for stablecoin adoption, and Alex sees identity as an important part of that ecosystem.

He also pointed out a significant difference in agent adoption between East and West. According to Alex, current agent power users are heavily concentrated in China and Chinese-speaking communities. That suggests that Asia may move faster in adopting financial agents and building new services around them.

For companies like zkMe, this creates a meaningful opportunity. The future of autonomous finance may not be shaped only in the US or Europe. It may also be shaped in markets like Hong Kong, China, Thailand, and broader Southeast Asia.

Money20/20 Asia and the startup pitch competition

The conversation took place during Money20/20 Asia in Bangkok, where Alex had also participated in the Startup Pitch Competition.

zkMe entered the competition after winning a pitch competition at Consensus in Hong Kong. At Money20/20 Asia, Alex found the quality of the startup cohort strong, with many companies focused on regtech, compliance, and financial infrastructure.

For him, the event was not only about the competition. It was also a learning and networking opportunity.

He noted that this year’s Money20/20 Asia had a clear focus on stablecoins, agentic AI, autonomous finance, and the convergence of traditional finance and Web3. One of the most encouraging signals was the growing openness of traditional finance players toward Web3 technologies.

The divide between DeFi and traditional finance appears to be narrowing, and Alex believes this could create new opportunities for companies building infrastructure at the intersection of both worlds.

The founder challenge: explaining complex technology simply

When asked about the challenges of entrepreneurship, Alex pointed to something many technical founders struggle with: messaging.

Building the technology is difficult, but explaining it clearly can be just as challenging.

Concepts like zero-knowledge proofs, self-sovereign identity, decentralized compliance, and autonomous finance can be complex. For a company like zkMe, the challenge is not only to build the infrastructure, but to package it in a way that customers, partners, regulators, and investors can understand.

Alex acknowledged that simplifying complex topics into accessible messages has been a key learning curve for him as a founder.

What’s next for zkMe

Looking ahead, zkMe is focusing on scaling the agent side of its identity stack.

The company’s original go-to-market focused on Web3-native use cases such as launchpads, token distribution platforms, and DeFi protocols. Over the next year and a half, zkMe plans to focus more heavily on bridges between traditional finance, DeFi, and the emerging agent economy.

Alex believes agents may become the use case that DeFi has been waiting for.

In his view, DeFi has remained difficult for mainstream users because the knowledge barrier is too high. Many decentralized financial products are powerful, but they are built for power users. Agents could abstract that complexity away and make these products more accessible to ordinary users.

That could revive some of DeFi’s original promise: giving more people access to financial services that were previously difficult to reach.

zkMe’s role in this future will be to help both DeFi protocols and traditional financial institutions become agent-ready. That means helping financial products become discoverable and usable by agents, while also helping customer-facing platforms safely offer additional financial services through agentic systems.

Why identity may define the next phase of finance

As finance becomes more automated, identity becomes a foundational layer.

If AI agents are going to move money, access accounts, assess risk, verify eligibility, and execute transactions, the system needs a way to know who they represent, what permissions they have, and what they are allowed to do.

At the same time, users should not have to give up control of their personal data to participate.

That is the space zkMe is working in: trust, privacy, compliance, and identity for a more autonomous financial world.

For anyone interested in fintech, digital identity, autonomous finance, privacy, Web3 infrastructure, or Southeast Asia’s role in financial innovation, this conversation offers a practical look at where the industry may be heading next.