Ant International, Mastercard and Visa said on Thursday they had begun collaborating on a Know-Your-Agent (KYA) interoperability framework intended to let card networks, digital wallet ecosystems, agent platforms and online marketplaces identify and onboard trusted artificial-intelligence agents across different payment ecosystems. The three organisations, announcing the initiative from Shanghai and Singapore, said the framework would rest on shared principles while preserving each network's own verification and decisioning processes. Citing McKinsey projections, the companies said AI agents were expected to orchestrate US$3 trillion to US$5 trillion of global consumer commerce by 2030. The work will be conducted through BuildFin.ai, an industry platform convened by the Monetary Authority of Singapore that brings together financial institutions, technology providers and researchers.
The collaboration follows a twelve-month period in which each participant built its own agentic payment rulebook, producing precisely the fragmentation the new effort seeks to address. Visa has developed its Trusted Agent Protocol, Mastercard has rolled out Mastercard Verifiable Intent, and Ant International introduced its open-sourced Agentic Mobile Protocol. The three companies said they would now explore opportunities to work towards common principles across those protocols rather than consolidate them into a single system. The initiative also builds on the Safeguards for Agentic Finance at Runtime (SAFR) framework developed by MAS with industry participants, extending it towards agent verification, accountability and risk management across payment ecosystems in Singapore.
THREE PILLARS OF THE FRAMEWORK
The companies set out three areas of focus for the KYA collaboration. The first, cross-network operator traceability, would link each agent to a validated operator, cardholder or business organisation, enabling clear attribution of agent activity. The second, shared certification requirements, would assess each agent against security and behavioural requirements to confirm it operates as expected. The third, continuous transaction monitoring, would evaluate each agent on an ongoing basis using a combination of identity and transaction-related signals to support recurring assessment and recertification.
The commercial rationale centres on eliminating duplicative onboarding. Under the proposed arrangement, common trust signals would be recognised across participating networks, so that an agent verified with one provider would not need to repeat identity verification elsewhere. Jiang-Ming Yang, chief innovation officer of Ant International, told CNBC that if an agent registers with Ant, "they don't need to register again with Visa, Mastercard." The companies said the approach would reduce integration complexity and cost and shorten time-to-market for new agentic services while improving trust and risk visibility across networks. Yang also framed the exercise in terms of consumer protection, telling CNBC that the potential for AI agents to hallucinate meant "we need to make sure people feel safe."
CARDS, WALLETS AND THE INTEROPERABILITY GAP
The alliance bridges two structurally different payment worlds. Visa and Mastercard dominate card transactions in developed economies, while many developing markets rely on electronic wallets, more than 50 of which are connected to Ant International's Alipay+ gateway. Ant International says Alipay+ now links 150 million merchants to over 50 digital wallets and banking apps, reaching more than 2 billion user accounts, including merchants connected through more than 10 national QR schemes across Asia and the Middle East. Wallet volumes underline the stakes: digital wallets accounted for 56% of global e-commerce value and 33% of point-of-sale value in 2025, representing more than US$13 trillion in spending, according to Worldpay.
Pablo Fourez, chief digital officer at Mastercard, said interoperability across Know-Your-Agent frameworks was essential to making agentic commerce work at scale, giving merchants, platforms, wallets and issuers a consistent way to recognise trusted agents and verify that actions reflect a user's intent. Rubail Birwadker, Visa's global head of growth products and strategic partnerships, said such collaborations could create more consistency and accountability as AI-driven transactions become more common. The announcement was framed as an initiation of work rather than a finished specification, and the parties did not publish technical standards, a governance structure or an implementation timetable. Executives at issuers and acquirers will be watching for those details, as well as for whether other card networks, wallet operators and agent platforms join the effort through BuildFin.ai.