Agentic AI · Financial technology · Institutions
Nicholas MacGregor Garcia
I work on agentic AI and financial technology — how these systems actually behave once a firm, a market, or a regulator has to depend on them. Working papers, field notes, and the occasional prototype live here. Start with the work ↓
Publications
Agent-based modeling of blockchain designs for interbank large-value payment systems. 24th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, Detroit.
The open-source Python simulator behind the AAMAS paper — modular, accessible, and designed with data privacy in mind for payment-system research. With Kenneth See and Hanzholah Shobri.
Text-mining of forum and broadcast data to map the stereotypes attached to gangtaiqiang, a mediatized variety of Taiwanese Mandarin. With Chun-Yi Peng, in Open Linguistics 6(1).
How the ideological commitments behind a system shape the governance that gets designed into it. Academy of Management Annual Meeting proceedings.
Working papers & projects
What happens to governance when prompt rules, retrieval stores, and model weights are owned by different parties — and why observability and repair rights matter more than they first appear.
Agents keep rediscovering the same first-party site APIs through the browser. Unbrowse turns that rediscovery into a shared, cached route graph, and makes a case against browser-first agent architectures. With Lewis Tham and Jungpil Hahn.
A simulated exchange run as a behavioral-finance lab — overconfidence, loss aversion, and the disposition effect observed across student trading contests in Singapore, Brazil, and the United States.
Agent-assisted grounded theory for process research. Machines propose patterns at scale; humans still name the categories, write the abductive memos, and build the theory. Framework, skill, and scripts.
A public semester starter pack for colleagues designing an undergraduate course on LLM-based agents: week outline, core readings, lab stack, evals, and peer syllabi.
Shorter pieces on where AI actually belongs inside a firm — and what a founder can decide this quarter instead of admiring in a demo.
About
Nicholas MacGregor Garcia is a Lecturer in Information Systems at the National University of Singapore and Deputy Director of the NUS FinTech Lab, where he leads industry relations. He teaches financial technology, AI governance, and blockchain, and holds a PhD in Information Systems from NYU Stern.
His research looks at how organizations actually govern and deploy AI and financial systems — from agent-based simulations of payment infrastructure to the question of who answers for a capable system when it gets something wrong. Most of what is here is still live rather than finished. If something is useful or off, find me on GitHub.