Ant International, Mastercard and Visa announce joint framework for verifying AI agents in payments
Ant International, Mastercard and Visa announce joint framework for verifying AI agents in payments #
Ant International, Mastercard and Visa announced September 10 that they are collaborating on a Know-Your-Agent (KYA) interoperability framework, a joint effort to create a consistent way to verify and onboard AI agents across payment networks. The announcement was distributed through a joint press release on Business Wire.
The framework is intended to give card networks, digital wallet ecosystems, agent platforms and marketplaces a shared method for identifying AI agents and linking their activity to an authorized human or business, without requiring each participant to build its own verification infrastructure from scratch.
Each company has already developed a separate agent trust protocol: Visa’s Trusted Agent Protocol, Mastercard Verifiable Intent and Ant International’s Agentic Mobile Protocol. The new effort will explore how those systems can recognize common trust signals while each network retains its own verification and decision-making processes.
The proposed framework has three components: cross-network operator traceability, which would link every AI agent to a validated individual or organization to ensure clear attribution of each action; shared certification requirements, under which agents would be assessed against agreed security and behavioral standards; and continuous transaction monitoring, combining identity and payment signals to evaluate agents on an ongoing basis.
The companies cited projections that AI agents could handle between $3 trillion and $5 trillion of global consumer commerce by 2030. As autonomous software moves from product recommendations to completing purchases, payment networks face pressure to determine which agents can act on a consumer’s behalf and to what degree.
The collaboration will operate through BuildFin.ai, an industry platform run by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) that brings together financial institutions, technology providers and researchers on AI applications in financial services. It will also build on MAS’s Safeguards for Agentic Finance at Runtime (SAFR) framework for managing risks in agentic financial transactions.
Rubail Birwadker, Visa’s Global Head of Growth Products and Strategic Partnerships, said in the announcement that as AI agents play a growing role in discovery and purchasing, “trust must scale with them.” Pablo Fourez, Mastercard’s Chief Digital Officer, said interoperability is “essential to making agentic commerce work at scale,” and that every interaction must remain “secure, transparent and grounded in consent.” Jiang-Ming Yang, Chief Innovation Officer at Ant International, called interoperability between card and wallet networks “critical for securing trust for our payment partners, platforms and merchants.”
Technode, which also covered the announcement, noted that the current scope remains exploratory. The companies have not published technical specifications, pilot volumes or an implementation timetable, and questions around liability, data sharing and dispute handling remain unresolved.
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