Visa, Mastercard and Ant start on Know-Your-Agent

Ant International, Mastercard, and Visa said on September 9 they will work toward interoperable Know-Your-Agent standards, hosted on Singapore's BuildFin.ai platform. Translation for anyone who sells online: the networks are building a way to tell whether the thing at your checkout is a person, a sanctioned AI agent, or a bot wearing a borrowed identity. That check is coming to your payment stack whether or not you opted into agentic commerce.

What actually happened

Three protocols that already exist separately are being pointed at each other: Visa's Trusted Agent Protocol, Mastercard's Verifiable Intent, and Ant International's Agentic Mobile Protocol. Per The Next Web's account of the announcement, the work runs through BuildFin.ai, a platform convened by the Monetary Authority of Singapore, and builds on MAS's Safeguards for Agentic Finance at Runtime framework.

The stated scope is three things: operator traceability, so an agent links back to a validated operator; shared certification against security and behavioral standards; and continuous monitoring using identity and transaction signals. Each network keeps its own verification and risk decisioning — this is about common principles at the seams, not a merged system.

Be clear about what this is not. There is no timeline, no launch date, and no named deliverable. The companies said they will explore common approaches. The motivating number — McKinsey's projection that agents could orchestrate $3 trillion to $5 trillion of consumer commerce by 2030 — is a forecast, not a run rate. What is real is the direction: every major network now agrees that agents need identity before they get to spend.

Why Know-Your-Agent matters for your business

Agent identity is going to arrive at your store as a risk signal you did not ask for. An unverifiable agent hitting your checkout will look like fraud to someone's model, and the decline lands on your order, not on the agent's operator. Merchants who cannot distinguish a certified shopping agent from a scraper will end up eating chargebacks or blocking real demand. Both cost the same money.

Two things are worth doing now, and neither requires picking a protocol. First, find out what already reaches your checkout. Segment your traffic by user agent, by request pattern, by session shape — most stores we look at have agent traffic and no idea, because it is filed under "bots." You cannot negotiate a policy for a population you have not counted.

Second, make the agent path a first-class one in your own system. That means a stable product feed, prices and stock that are correct over an API rather than only in HTML, and an order path that does not depend on a human reading a modal. When the networks finish deciding how agents prove themselves, the merchants who can accept a verified agent cleanly will get the volume. The ones whose checkout only works for a mouse will watch it route around them.

Sources: The Next Web: Visa and Mastercard join Ant on a Know-Your-Agent framework, BusinessWire: Ant International, Mastercard and Visa Initiate Collaboration on Know-Your-Agent Interoperability.