Visa, Mastercard and Ant International agree to make their three agent-identity protocols interoperable under a Know Your Agent framework

Ant International, Visa and Mastercard said on 10 September they will develop a shared know-your-agent (KYA) interoperability framework, so that an AI agent registered with one of them does not have to repeat identity verification with the others. Each already has its own scheme for this - Visa's Trusted Agent Protocol, Mastercard's Verifiable Intent and Ant International's Agentic Mobile Protocol - and the framework is meant to bind them into common standards that link each agent to a valid legal entity, assess its behaviour and monitor it in flight.

The three name reduced integration complexity, no duplicate agent verification, retained trust controls, faster time to market and lower integration cost for new agentic services as the goals. Ant International's chief innovation officer Jiang-Ming Yang said the parties look forward to expanding the collaboration as the industry draws on richer signals to enhance trust and simplify transactions.

No delivery date, specification release or pilot was named. The parties cite McKinsey's projection that AI agents could orchestrate 3 to 5 trillion dollars of global consumer commerce by 2030, and put the cost of outdated digital identity controls at roughly 100 billion dollars a year in fraud and related losses.

Agentic checkout has been arriving in Europe one rail at a time - Visa and Mastercard taking Anthropic's commerce-agent blueprint to their merchant networks, Revolut and Visa's passkey-authenticated payment in France, BLIK's first autonomous purchase in Poland - and each landing has raised the same unanswered question: who vouches for the agent. This is the two card networks that run European acceptance answering it together rather than separately, which is the difference between three proprietary onboarding regimes a European PSP would have to integrate one by one and a single identity that travels.

For acquirers and merchants the practical consequence is that agent identity is being settled at scheme level before any European regulator has a view on it, so the integration contract for agentic commerce will be scheme rules rather than PSD3, and Alipay+ being inside the tent from the start pulls the largest non-European wallet ecosystem into the same credential.

• Whether the three publish an actual specification rather than an intent to converge, and on what timetable
• Whether other schemes and the European A2A rails now doing agentic pilots - Wero, BLIK, Bizum - join or build a separate one
• How the framework handles liability and chargebacks when an agent transacts, which is where scheme rules and PSD2 or PSD3 authentication requirements will have to meet
• Whether European acquirers get access on the same terms as the platforms

• pymnts.com
• CNBC on the three-way agent standard, 10 Sep 2026