​

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 plane, 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.

​

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