Ant International, Mastercard and Visa announced a collaboration in São Paulo to create a shared Know-Your-Agent (KYA) framework. The interoperability mechanism aims to recognize and verify AI agents initiating payments on behalf of people or businesses.
The announcement brings together three protocols previously developed separately: Ant International's Agentic Mobile Protocol, Mastercard's Verifiable Intent, and Visa's Trusted Agent Protocol.
The problem KYA aims to solve
As AI agents become capable of making purchases, subscribing to services, and executing transactions autonomously, payment networks, digital wallets, and marketplaces need a reliable way to identify what is on the other side of a transaction. Without a common standard, each payment network and agent platform would need its own verification process, increasing integration costs for product teams.
KYA proposes an interoperability layer through which trust signals can be recognized across card networks, digital wallets, and agent marketplaces. The goal is to reduce duplicate checks and integration costs while allowing each network to retain its own risk management and transaction approval criteria.
Why this matters for teams building agents
For engineering teams working on agentic commerce, from shopping assistants to back-office automations paying suppliers, the absence of a shared agent identity standard is an obstacle to safe production use.
If adopted across the ecosystem, a framework such as KYA could reduce the need for separate credential integrations with every payment network and establish common terms for agent authentication.
It is too early to know how quickly adoption will progress. The announcement marks the start of collaboration, rather than delivery of a final open specification. Further developments to watch include auditing, revocation of compromised agent credentials, and interoperability with initiatives outside the Ant, Visa and Mastercard collaboration.
Payments as infrastructure for agents
KYA is part of a broader effort by payment companies to standardize how AI agents interact with real money. It parallels work in the security and observability of AI agents, where identity and traceability are prerequisites for granting meaningful autonomy to an automated system.