Ant International, Visa, Mastercard work to make agentic protocols interoperable 

Ant International, Mastercard and Visa are collaborating on a Know-Your-Agent (KYA) interoperability framework, which a release says is “designed to help card networks, digital wallet ecosystems, agent platforms and marketplaces streamline agent onboarding and identification across networks, based on shared principles while preserving each network’s own verification and decisioning processes.”

The collaboration provides a strong foundation for interoperability in agentic payments, with three major players that have rolled out agentic protocols (Visa’s Trusted Agent Protocol, Mastercard Verifiable Intent, and Ant International’s Agentic Mobile Protocol) agreeing to work towards common principles to strengthen trust and governance in the agentic commerce ecosystem. 

The goal is to simplify agentic payment transactions for service providers, agent platforms and marketplaces while maintaining robust guardrails. Common trust signals can be recognized across the ecosystem, helping to reduce integration complexity and duplicative agent identity verification efforts, leading to faster time-to-market and lower integration costs without sacrificing trust. 

The model is the Safeguards for Agentic Finance at Runtime (SAFR) framework, which leverages the BuildFin.ai platform convened by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to to advance common approaches for AI agent verification, accountability and risk management across payment ecosystems.

Continuous verification moves across network boundaries

The KYA collaboration centers on making agents traceable across networks, linking each one to a validated operator, cardholder, or organization with clear attribution. The three entities will share standard certification requirements, and deploy continuous monitoring using identity and transaction-related signals to support ongoing certification.

“As AI agents become a bigger part of how people discover and buy, trust must scale with them,” says Rubail Birwadker, global head of growth products and strategic partnerships for Visa. “Collaborations like this can help create more consistency, better accountability, and greater confidence across the payments ecosystem as AI-driven transactions become more common.”  

Pablo Fourez, chief digital officer for Mastercard, agrees that “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.” 

Jiang-Ming Yang, chief innovation officer of Ant International, says the company “looks forward to expanding collaboration as the industry draws on richer signals – capabilities, behavior, execution performance, and risk data – to enhance trust and simplify transactions for our clients and their customers.”  

By 2030, AI agents are projected to orchestrate $3 trillion to 5 trillion of global consumer commerce. 

Article Topics

agentic commerce  |  AI agents  |  Ant Group  |  continuous verification  |  digital wallets  |  KYA  |  Mastercard  |  non-human identities  |  onboarding  |  Visa