AI agents are moving toward the checkout. On September 10, 2026, Ant International, Visa, and Mastercard announced a collaboration to develop standards for verifying those agents and allowing them to operate across payment systems.
The work centers on a Know-Your-Agent, or KYA, interoperability framework for agentic commerce. Its goal is to help card networks, digital wallet ecosystems, agent platforms, and marketplaces streamline agent onboarding and identification across networks—because asking every digital helper to repeat the same paperwork is not a business model.
The projected market gives the project its scale. McKinsey’s QuantumBlack research unit said on January 28, 2026, that even under moderate scenarios, AI agents could mediate US$3 trillion to US$5 trillion of global consumer commerce by 2030. Ant International, Visa, and Mastercard expect agents to handle the same range of consumer commerce by that year.
Three rules for agents that cross payment networks
The KYA architecture establishes requirements and accountability for payment networks and service providers. It is designed to verify agent identities and support secure, trusted transaction execution, while the collaboration focuses on verifying agents, monitoring their behaviour, and letting them work across payment systems.
The framework has three central elements: Cross-network Operator Traceability, Shared Certification Requirements, and Continuous Transaction Monitoring. Together, they address who operates an agent, whether it meets shared standards, and what it does after entering a transaction system.
Jiang-Ming Yang, chief innovation officer of Ant International, described the basic principle in plain terms: “Trust is the foundation of the AI transformation.” He also said, “If [an] agent registers with Ant, they don’t need to register again with Visa, Mastercard.”
Mastercard’s chief digital officer, Pablo Fourez, framed the same problem as an interoperability issue: “Interoperability across Know-Your-Agent frameworks is essential to making agentic commerce work at scale.” The statement points to the practical aim of the collaboration—one agent identity that can move across participating systems without starting from zero each time.
Protocols are arriving before the rulebook
In the past 12 months, Visa, Mastercard, and Ant International have each announced systems for AI agents to complete payments securely. Existing protocols include Visa’s Trusted Agent Protocol, Mastercard Verifiable Intent, and Ant International’s Agentic Mobile Protocol.
Ant International launched the open-sourced Agentic Mobile Protocol, or AMP, on April 28, 2026. Other open-source protocols, including MCP, A2A, AP2, ACP, and UCP, enable agents to read data, negotiate with other agents, and transact safely.
That activity reflects a six-level automation curve for agentic commerce, moving from programmed convenience to networked multiagent commerce. The standards effort is arriving as the technology stack expands, which is sensible timing for once: payment infrastructure tends to dislike surprises.
Ant International brings a large wallet network to the collaboration. More than 50 e-wallets have partnered with the company, which runs an “Alipay Plus” app, while digital wallets accounted for 56% of global e-commerce value and 33% of point-of-sale value in 2025—more than $13 trillion in spending.
Users can already set recurring requests through Alipay AI features, such as ordering Starbucks or requesting rides from Didi. An Alipay press release described a request to “buy me a Starbucks iced Americano at 10 a.m. every day,” after which the app places the order at the designated time before prompting the user to complete payment.
Ant International separated nearly three years ago from Hangzhou-based Ant Group, which runs the Alipay mobile payments app in mainland China. The distinction matters because the KYA collaboration involves Ant International’s payment standards work, including AMP, alongside the global card networks Visa and Mastercard.
If AI agents are expected to orchestrate trillions of dollars in commerce, identity and accountability cannot remain optional features bolted onto payment systems later. The KYA framework is an attempt to define who gets trusted, how that trust travels, and whether an agent’s behaviour stays within the boundaries that made the transaction possible.
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