Visa, Mastercard and Ant International have begun collaborating on a Know-Your-Agent interoperability framework meant to help card networks, wallets, agent platforms and marketplaces recognize trusted AI agents that can buy on a user’s behalf.
The companies framed the work as an early push toward shared principles—not a finished global ID system. Each network would keep its own verification, risk management and final say on which agents to trust.
The effort builds on protocols the firms already rolled out on their own: Visa’s Trusted Agent Protocol, Mastercard’s Verifiable Intent and Ant International’s Agentic Mobile Protocol. According to the company statement, the collaboration will run through BuildFin.ai, an industry platform convened by the Monetary Authority of Singapore, and build on MAS’s Safeguards for Agentic Finance at Runtime, or SAFR, framework for payment ecosystems in Singapore.
In practical terms, the three say they want common approaches to operator traceability (linking an agent to a validated operator, cardholder or business), shared certification requirements, and continuous monitoring of identity and transaction signals. CNBC reported that Ant International’s chief innovation officer, Jiang-Ming Yang, described the goal as cutting duplicate agent registration across networks.
What the announcement does not include, secondary reports note, is a public technical specification, a named governance body, or an implementation timeline. Company materials have cited a McKinsey projection of a multi-trillion-dollar agentic commerce opportunity by 2030; that figure is a consultancy estimate cited by the firms, not an independently verified market size.
For readers, the stakes are the rails under agent checkout: if software starts spending money for people, payment networks need a way to know which agent is acting, for whom, and whether it is still behaving as certified—without forcing every platform to reinvent identity checks on every network.