Visa, Mastercard and Ant International Team Up on a Standard for Verifying AI Shopping Agents

SINGAPORE — Visa, Mastercard and Ant International said this week they are working together on a "Know-Your-Agent," or KYA, interoperability framework meant to standardize how AI shopping agents are verified and identified across digital wallets, card networks and online marketplaces. The effort is being coordinated through BuildFin.ai, a fintech initiative operating under Singapore’s Monetary Authority, rather than run bilaterally between the companies.

Each of the three networks has already built its own version of agent-verification infrastructure: Visa has its Trusted Agent Protocol, Mastercard its Verifiable Intent framework, and Ant International its Agentic Mobile Protocol. The KYA effort is not a replacement for any of them — it is an attempt to align the three so that a merchant or wallet provider does not need to separately integrate with each network’s bespoke standard to accept purchases initiated by an AI agent rather than a person tapping "buy."

The underlying problem the three companies are converging on is a real and fairly new one: as AI agents move from answering questions to actually completing purchases on a consumer’s behalf, merchants and card networks need some way to confirm that a given transaction was authorized by the consumer, initiated by a legitimate agent rather than a fraudulent script, and within whatever spending limits the consumer set — without that verification requiring a different protocol for every wallet-network combination.

That three competitors are cooperating on a shared standard, rather than each trying to make its own protocol the default, is itself notable and consistent with how card networks have historically approached fraud and interoperability standards — EMV chip specifications and 3-D Secure both emerged from similar multi-network collaboration because a fragmented standard would have made agent commerce harder for every party to adopt, competitors included.

None of the three companies has published a timeline for when KYA-compliant verification would be required, or optional, for merchants processing agent-initiated purchases, and the framework itself is described as still under development rather than a finished specification. The practical test will be adoption: a standard that only the three founding companies use is not interoperable in any way that matters to a merchant, and getting competing wallet providers, marketplaces and smaller card networks to adopt a shared verification layer has historically taken years even for standards with less novel underlying technology than autonomous purchasing agents.