Ant International, Mastercard, Visa team up on agent verification framework

Ant International, Mastercard, and Visa are working together on a Know-Your-Agent (KYA) framework designed to enable interoperability for AI-powered commerce across payment networks, digital wallets, agent platforms, and online marketplaces.

The proposed standard would establish common principles for how AI agents are onboarded and identified when they operate across different systems. Despite the shared framework, each organisation would retain control over its own verification processes and risk decisions.

The collaboration follows each company's launch of its own agent protocol. Visa introduced its Trusted Agent Protocol, Mastercard rolled out Verifiable Intent, and Ant International deployed its Agentic Mobile Protocol.

The three firms will now explore ways to align these separate systems around common principles. The goal is to simplify how service providers, agent platforms, and marketplaces manage agentic payment transactions while preserving trust and risk management capabilities.

Under the framework, every AI agent would be linked to a verified operator — whether that's a cardholder, business, or other organisation. This connection ensures that actions taken by an agent can be traced back to an identifiable party.

The framework also contemplates shared certification standards. Agents would be evaluated against security and behavioural criteria to confirm they're functioning as intended.

Continuous monitoring would track agents using identity and transaction signals. This data would feed into ongoing assessments and certification decisions.

The companies believe the arrangement could lower integration costs and accelerate the rollout of new agentic services across the payments ecosystem.

The initiative will operate through BuildFin.ai in Singapore and builds on the Safeguards for Agentic Finance at Runtime (SAFR) framework. BuildFin.ai is a platform convened by the Monetary Authority of Singapore that connects financial institutions, technology providers, and researchers to develop responsible AI solutions for financial services.

Collaborations like this can help create more consistency, better accountability, and greater confidence across the payments ecosystem as AI-driven transactions become more common.

— Rubail Birwadker, Visa global head of growth products and strategic partnerships

Interoperability across Know-Your-Agent frameworks is essential to making agentic commerce work at scale, giving merchants, platforms, wallets and issuers a consistent way to recognise trusted agents, verify that actions reflect the user's intent, and preserve accountability across the transaction.

— Pablo Fourez, Mastercard chief digital officer

We look forward to expanding collaboration as the industry draws on richer signals — capabilities, behaviour, execution performance, and risk data — to enhance trust and simplify transactions for our clients and their customers.

— Jiang-Ming Yang, Ant International chief innovation officer