​

Approval Workflows for Agent Payments

Approval workflows let you keep low-risk agent payments fast while routing exceptional cases through human review. In Conto, approvals are part of the payment control center, not an afterthought layered on later.

​

When to Use Approval Workflows

Approval workflows are a strong fit when you need any of the following:

• Payments above a finance threshold
• New recipients that have not built trust yet
• Category-specific review, such as treasury or vendor onboarding flows
• Role-based approvals for finance, ops, or compliance
• Dual control or sequential review for larger transfers

​

How the Flow Works

​

How Conto Matches a Workflow

Conto evaluates active workflows in priority order and picks the first workflow whose trigger conditions match the payment context. Workflow matching runs for every non-denied payment. That means a workflow can deliberately hold an otherwise policy-approved request, which is how verifier pilots such as Delta act as an approval gate without becoming the settlement layer. If the policy engine itself requires human approval and no custom workflow matches, Conto creates a one-review approval request through a system-managed route. This guarantees that every approval alert has a decision record that Owners, Admins, or Managers can open, approve, or reject. The system-managed route is internal and is not listed with configurable workflows.

​

Supported trigger conditions

This makes approval workflows a good complement to trust scoring and counterparty rules. For example, you can auto-approve trusted vendors while forcing review for unknown recipients. agentIds is especially useful for staged rollouts and verifier pilots. It lets you bind a workflow to one or two agents in a mixed org without turning on the same review path for every other agent.

​

Workflow Settings That Matter

​

External Approval Channels

Approval requests can be delivered to external channels so finance or ops teams can act without logging into Conto for every review. Supported channels include:

• Slack
• Email
• Telegram
• WhatsApp
• Webhook

Each decision records the acting channel, and Conto keeps an audit trail of who approved, when they approved, and how the request was resolved. For step-by-step setup, see /guides/external-approvals.

​

Recommended Patterns

​

Pattern 1: Single approval for large payments

​

Pattern 2: Review first-time recipients

​

Pattern 3: Dual control for sensitive transfers

​

Pattern 4: Sequential approval for finance + security

​

Pattern 5: Scoped verifier pilot in a shared org

​

Pair Approval Workflows with Trust Scoring

One of the highest-signal combinations is:

1. Use trust scoring to classify counterparties.
2. Let trusted or verified recipients flow normally.
3. Route unknown or deteriorating counterparties into approval workflows.

That gives you a fast path for established counterparties and a controlled path for new or risky ones.

​

Canonical Approval Architecture

The most common production stack looks like this:

• Policy engine blocks clearly disallowed payments outright.
• Trust scoring enriches the recipient before the payment is evaluated.
• Approval workflows catch the gray area between auto-approve and hard deny.
• External channels deliver requests to the real stakeholders.
• Audit logs and webhooks make the outcome visible to finance and operations systems.

​

Related Guides