Visa, Mastercard and Ant want to check an AI shopping agent's ID before it pays

AI agents are moving from recommending purchases to making them. Three of the largest payment companies in the world have now agreed the problem needs a shared answer.

Ant International, Mastercard and Visa have begun collaborating on a Know-Your-Agent — or KYA — interoperability framework, designed to help card networks, digital wallets, agent platforms and marketplaces identify and onboard AI agents across networks.

The Problem It Addresses

Payments have long relied on know-your-customer rules: establishing who a person is before letting them move money.

An AI agent buying something on someone's behalf breaks that model. The payment network needs to know not only who the customer is, but whether the agent acting for them is legitimate, whether it is authorised to spend, and who is accountable if it does something the customer did not intend.

KYA is the attempt to answer those questions consistently, so an agent verified on one network is not a stranger on another.

Three Protocols, One Direction

The three companies are not starting from nothing. Each already has its own approach.

Visa has its Trusted Agent Protocol. Mastercard has Verifiable Intent. Ant International has its Agentic Mobile Protocol. The new framework is meant to establish common principles across them, while each network keeps its own verification and decision-making processes.

That structure is telling. It is interoperability, not a single standard. The companies are agreeing on how their systems should recognise each other's signals — not merging them.

Why It Matters Now

The scale being projected is large. AI agents are forecast to orchestrate between $3 trillion and $5 trillion of global consumer commerce by 2030.

Forecasts of that kind should be treated with caution; they are projections, not measurements. But even a fraction of that figure would make agent identity a core part of payments infrastructure, and the companies that shape the rules early tend to shape the market that follows.

What The Announcement Does Not Include

This is the part coverage tends to skip.

What has been announced is a framework under development, not a technical standard deployed across the three networks. The participants did not provide an implementation timetable, pilot volumes, or a list of merchants and financial institutions that will test it.

That does not make it insignificant — agreement among competitors on principles is often the hardest step. But it means consumers will not encounter anything different at checkout for some time.

The Questions Still Open

Several questions matter more than the framework's name.

Who is liable when an authorised agent makes a purchase the customer did not want? How are refunds and disputes handled when the buyer was software? What happens to a small agent developer who cannot meet verification requirements designed by the largest networks? And how do regulators treat a system of agent identity designed primarily by the companies that profit from payments?

What To Watch

Whether a published specification and pilot schedule follow. Whether other networks and wallet providers join, or build competing approaches. And whether regulators move to set their own rules for agent-initiated payments — because the rules for money moved by software are currently being written largely by the companies moving it.