Visa, Mastercard and Ant International launch a Know-Your-Agent framework initiative to identify and verify AI agents that buy goods or services for users. Announced September 10, the collaboration targets interoperability across card networks, digital wallets, agent platforms and online marketplaces.

The companies are addressing a basic gap in agentic commerce: payment systems can authenticate cards and account holders, but merchants also need to know which software is acting and whether it carries legitimate purchasing authority. The initiative connects four parts of that trust chain:

• Recognizing an AI agent across different payment ecosystems.
• Verifying that the agent is trusted to initiate a purchase.
• Preserving each network's approval and risk controls.
• Sharing stronger transaction context with merchants and platforms.

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Know-Your-Agent Framework Targets Cross-Network Verification

The project is intended to let participating systems recognize a trusted purchasing agent even when it crosses company boundaries. A wallet, card network, marketplace and AI platform could use common signals instead of building a separate identity integration for every bilateral relationship.

Reuters reported that the partners have begun collaborating on the interoperability framework. The wording matters: they announced a standards initiative, not a finished universal specification or a live consumer product available across all three companies' networks.

Visa, Mastercard and Ant International said participating companies would retain their own approval and risk-management processes. A shared way to recognize an agent therefore would not force a payment network or merchant to accept a transaction, replace fraud screening or eliminate normal authorization checks.

The intended benefit is portable trust. If the same agent identity and authority can be interpreted across networks, developers may need fewer custom integrations and merchants may gain better visibility into automated traffic that otherwise resembles an unknown bot.

Visa, Mastercard and Ant Bring Existing Agent Protocols

The initiative will build on three systems the companies developed separately: Visa's Trusted Agent Protocol, Mastercard Verifiable Intent and Ant International's Agentic Mobile Protocol. The collaboration is an attempt to make those approaches work together instead of becoming competing islands.

Visa describes its protocol as a way for merchants to distinguish legitimate shopping agents from malicious or unwanted automation. Its published design goals include supporting guest and signed-in checkout, keeping visibility into the consumer behind an agent and using existing web infrastructure rather than requiring a complete payment-stack rewrite.

Mastercard's contribution is centered on verifiable intent, while Ant brings experience with mobile wallets and alternative payment methods. The partners have not published a combined technical specification explaining the exact credentials, message formats, revocation process or certification requirements the new framework will use.

That missing detail will determine whether Know-Your-Agent becomes a broadly implementable standard or remains a coordination layer among major networks. Developers will need stable specifications, test environments and governance rules before they can rely on the framework in production.

BuildFin.ai Gives the Payments Project a Regulatory Forum

The companies will develop the work through BuildFin.ai, a platform convened by the Monetary Authority of Singapore. Reuters said the forum brings together financial institutions, technology providers and researchers to build AI applications for financial services.

A regulator-convened setting is useful because agentic payments cross familiar institutional boundaries. A single purchase may involve an AI provider, identity service, merchant, payment processor, wallet, card network and issuing bank, each with different responsibilities and access to different evidence.

Other standards efforts show how quickly the field is forming. Google's Agent Payments Protocol, launched in 2025 with support from payment and technology companies including Ant International, uses digital mandates to create evidence of a user's instructions and authorization across an agent-led transaction.

Know-Your-Agent addresses a related interoperability problem: establishing that a recognized software agent is presenting itself to the payment ecosystem. Identity and intent need to work together, but they are not interchangeable. A valid agent could still misunderstand an instruction, exceed a spending limit or select the wrong product.

Agentic Purchases Still Need Liability and Dispute Rules

The framework arrives as AI shopping tools move beyond product recommendations toward completing checkout. That transition creates a higher standard for evidence because an automated mistake can reserve inventory, move money, expose account details or trigger a contractual dispute before the user reviews the action.

Merchants also face a difficult traffic problem. Aggressive bot defenses may block useful shopping agents, while weak controls can admit scraping, credential abuse or fraudulent automation. Portable agent verification could help classify that traffic, but risk decisions still depend on transaction context and merchant policy.

The announcement does not yet answer who bears a loss when an authenticated agent acts outside a user's instructions. It also leaves open how consent is captured, how credentials are withdrawn, which data travels between networks, and how consumers challenge an agent-initiated purchase.

Those questions are the practical test for the initiative. Success will require more than a recognizable agent identifier: the system must connect identity to scoped authority, preserve auditable evidence, minimize data exposure and fit existing authorization, fraud and chargeback processes.

The next meaningful milestones will be publication of the combined specification, named implementation partners, developer tools and live transaction pilots. Until those arrive, Know-Your-Agent is a significant alignment among three payment groups, but not yet proof that autonomous checkout can operate safely across the wider commerce ecosystem.