A shared Know-Your-Agent standard would let a wallet, card network or online store recognize a trusted AI agent from another company’s payment system without giving up its own risk checks.
Visa, Mastercard and Ant International have begun working on the standard together, Reuters reported on Thursday. The work runs through BuildFin.ai, a platform set up by the Monetary Authority of Singapore, and is aimed at payment systems in the city-state.
Under the plan, every agent would be tied to a vetted operator, cardholder or organization that other networks could trace it back to. The partners would also agree on how agents are certified and keep checking them afterwards against identity and transaction data. No technical specification or timeline has been published yet.
The standard builds on protocols each company already runs for agent payments: Visa’s Trusted Agent Protocol, Mastercard’s Verifiable Intent and Ant International’s Agentic Mobile Protocol. The companies say a shared approach could cut integration costs and speed up the launch of agent services.
In its first phase, Ant’s protocol is rolling out with 10 wallets, including Alipay, GCash and KakaoPay, and seven merchant acquirers, among them Adyen, Fiserv and Worldline.
The payments industry is preparing for agents that complete purchases instead of only recommending them. A Visa report says it is still unclear who pays when an agent’s purchase goes wrong. Commerce has traditionally relied on a person answering for each sale. With an agent in between, an attack that diverts its money could leave the user, the platform, the model provider or the merchant holding the loss.
Chargeback rules, the report adds, assume purchases at a human pace, while agents may transact with each other by the thousand.