What the three companies announced
Ant International, Mastercard and Visa said on 10 September that they will work on common standards for identifying and verifying AI agents that make purchases on a user’s behalf, TNW reported. The shorthand is Know-Your-Agent, deliberately echoing the know-your-customer rules banks already run.
The point is not to build a new protocol. Each company already has one: Visa’s Trusted Agent Protocol, Mastercard’s Verifiable Intent, and Ant International’s Agentic Mobile Protocol, which launched in April and is open-sourced on GitHub. The initiative is about making them interoperable, so that an agent registered with Ant does not have to register again with Visa or Mastercard.
Three pieces of work
The companies set out three areas. Operator traceability across networks, linking each agent to a validated operator, cardholder or business. Shared certification, under which an agent is assessed against security and behavioural requirements once. And continuous monitoring of each agent using identity and transaction signals.
That is a recognisable shape: an identity, a certification, and ongoing behavioural checks — the same three layers card networks already apply to merchants.
Why now
“Interoperability across Know-Your-Agent frameworks is essential to making agentic commerce work at scale,” said Pablo Fourez, Mastercard’s chief digital officer. Rubail Birwadker, Visa’s global head of growth products, put it as: “As AI agents become a bigger part of how people discover and buy, trust must scale with them.”
The number being used to justify the effort comes from McKinsey, which projects that AI agents could orchestrate $3tn to $5tn of global consumer commerce by 2030. Jiang-Ming Yang, Ant International’s chief innovation officer, said its protocol “was built to let agents enter existing mobile-payment systems as trusted actors”, TNGlobal reported.
The regulatory setting
The work runs through BuildFin.ai, a platform of the Monetary Authority of Singapore, building on its SAFR framework — which puts a financial regulator in the room while the standard is drafted rather than after.
What to watch
No completion timeline was given, and that is the first thing to watch: a standards effort between three competitors either produces a specification within a year or becomes a working group. The second is whether anyone else joins. Three networks covering a large share of card volume is a strong start, but agentic commerce also runs through wallets, marketplaces and agent platforms that were not party to this announcement.
