--- title: "Ask an agent: who is this counterparty? – Elucidate" description: "A recorded session with the Elucidate directory's MCP server, on video: what an agent asked, what each tool returned, and the three properties that make institution data usable by AI agents—identifiers, provenance and stated limits." url: https://elucidate.co/blog/ask-an-agent-who-is-this-counterparty --- [Home](https://elucidate.co/) [Blog](https://elucidate.co/blog) [Compliance](https://elucidate.co/category/compliance) Ask an agent: who is this counterparty? What AI agents need from institution data [Compliance](https://elucidate.co/category/compliance) # Ask an agent: who is this counterparty? What AI agents need from institution data We connected an AI assistant to our directory and asked it one counterparty question. Five tool calls later, every fact in its answer had a source and a date—which is the point. [Technology](https://elucidate.co/tags/technology) [Data](https://elucidate.co/tags/data) [Regtech](https://elucidate.co/tags/regtech) [Elucidate team](https://elucidate.co/author/elucidate-team) Nov 6, 2026  · 4  min read ## Introduction AI agents are starting to do the first pass of counterparty work: pulling an institution’s identifiers, its licences, its sanctions exposure and its owners into an onboarding file before an analyst reads it. How good that first pass is depends less on the model than on what the model can look up—and on whether it can say where each answer came from. So we tried it. We connected an assistant to the [Model Context Protocol (MCP) server](https://elucidate.co/for-agents#mcp) of the Elucidate Bank & Firm Directory and asked one question: _is Wise Payments Limited licensed, and is it on a sanctions list?_ The video shows the session as it was recorded on 6 November 2026. Five tool calls, recorded live on 6 November 2026, and the answer written from them. The tool names are the server’s own. ## What the agent did The agent made five calls, in the order a compliance analyst would work: 1. **`search_directory`** found seven entries for “Wise Payments Limited”: four BIC8s of the UK company, all with the same Legal Entity Identifier (LEI), and three companies with similar names in Hong Kong, Thailand and New Zealand. The name alone did not settle which one was meant; the identifiers did. 2. **`get_institution`** returned the head-office page for `TRWIGB2B`, with Swift’s BIC data as at 24 October 2026. 3. **`get_licences`** returned one active entry: the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) lists the company as an Authorised E-Money Institution, number 900507, since 7 June 2018. The register was retrieved on 25 September 2026. 4. **`check_sanctions`** found no OFAC or EU listing that cites the BIC, against the lists as matched on 21 and 23 October 2026—and said in the same answer that this is not a sanctions screen. 5. **`get_ownership`** returned the control chain at Companies House as at 9 October 2026: Wise Financial Holdings Ltd holds 75% or more of the shares and votes, with Wise Group plc of Jersey at the top. None of this is new information about Wise. What is worth noticing is the shape of the answer: every line carries a source and a date, and the one line that could be misread—“no listing”—arrives with its limit attached. ## What makes data agent-ready A model can write a fluent paragraph about any bank. Whether that paragraph can go into an onboarding file depends on three properties of the data behind it. - **Identifiers, not names.** Institutions share names. In our directory, 3,993 names are each carried by more than one entry (as at 6 November 2026), as our post on [“Which Citibank?”](https://elucidate.co/blog/which-citibank-names-are-not-identifiers) shows. An agent that resolves on a BIC8, an LEI or a licence number picks one entry; an agent that resolves on a name has to guess. - **Provenance on every fact.** A licence without its register and retrieval date cannot be checked, and a fact that cannot be checked cannot be relied on. Each tool answer names its source and the date of the data. - **Stated limits.** The absence of a listing, a licence or a person is not evidence that none exists. Data that says what it does not hold is safer to automate than data that stays silent. The result? An answer an analyst can verify in minutes, rather than one that has to be redone from scratch. ## Why a protocol, and not a scrape An agent could read our directory pages directly; every page also exists as Markdown for that reason. The MCP server adds what an agent needs to work reliably: named tools with defined inputs, structured answers alongside the text, and the page address to cite with each one. It is read-only, needs no sign-in and serves the same public data as the pages. The data tools—licences, sanctions, ownership and people—answer only through the server. They have no public URL of their own and sit behind its rate limits, 120 requests a minute per address. Open data and responsible access are not in conflict; they need a front door. ## Where Elucidate can help Any client that supports remote MCP servers can connect to the directory: the address, the tools and the limits are on our [page for agents](https://elucidate.co/for-agents#mcp). The directory itself stays free. Identification is where due diligence starts. For banks and payment firms that need to go further, the [Elucidate FinCrime Index (EFI)](https://elucidate.co/directory/score) is an independent score of the financial crime risk of banks and payment firms—comparable to a credit risk rating, applied to financial crime. An agent is only as good as what it can cite. We would rather it cited the register than guessed. Connect an assistant to the directory Add the Elucidate directory's MCP server to any client that supports remote servers: read-only, no sign-in, every answer with the page address to cite. [Read the agent docs](https://elucidate.co/for-agents#mcp) Related Content [Compliance](https://elucidate.co/category/compliance) [Which Citibank? Names are not identifiers, for analysts or for AI](https://elucidate.co/blog/which-citibank-names-are-not-identifiers) What our directory data shows about institutions that share a name, why an answer built on a name has to guess (whether it comes from an analyst or an AI assistant), and how the BIC and the LEI settle the question, on video. [Compliance](https://elucidate.co/category/compliance) [Beyond the BIC: why we built one directory for banks and regulated payment firms](https://elucidate.co/blog/beyond-the-bic-bank-and-firm-directory) The data behind the Elucidate Bank & Firm Directory—Swift's BIC directory, GLEIF and 22 regulator registers—how we standardise and link it, what it does not show, and why an identification layer is only useful if it is current. [Compliance](https://elucidate.co/category/compliance) [Who reads the directory? A week of machine traffic](https://elucidate.co/blog/who-reads-the-directory) A week of elucidate.co's request logs, 22 to 28 October 2026, in shares: who asks for the directory's pages, which AI crawlers read it, what an assistant fetching a page for someone means, and why every page has a Markdown twin. On video.