The three-way understanding on AI agent authentication: promises of interoperability, undefined standards

Ant International, Mastercard and Visa have announced the start of a collaboration to define an interoperability framework called «Know-Your-Agent» (KYA); Reuters dated the announcement 10 September 2026, while the text of the release went out on the Business Wire feed on 9 September. The initiative aims to have AI agents deemed trustworthy recognised across platforms, digital wallets and merchants, overcoming the fragmentation that has built up over the past year. Until now each player has moved on its own, building competing proprietary infrastructure: Visa's Trusted Agent Protocol, Mastercard's Verifiable Intent and Ant International's Agentic Mobile Protocol. The theoretical benefit on offer is lower integration costs, sparing an agent already cleared by one network from repeating the entire registration procedure with the others.

The working group sits on top of the BuildFin.ai platform, promoted by the Monetary Authority of Singapore, and draws on the SAFR reference framework (Safeguards for Agentic Finance at Runtime). The KYA architecture as described rests on three pillars: traceability of the agent across networks, linked to a validated operator, cardholder or organisation; certification requirements covering security and behaviour; and continuous monitoring based on identity and transaction signals, feeding certification decisions. In support of the operation, the release cites a third-party estimate from McKinsey, according to which AI agents will orchestrate between $3 trillion and $5 trillion of global consumer spending by 2030. On current costs, figures published by PYMNTS on 10 September 2026 attribute an annual loss of roughly $100 billion for businesses to outdated identity checks, while industry surveys cited by Forkast indicate that only 14% of consumers trust automated purchases without verification, and 42% withhold that trust above $25.

Beyond the stated intentions, the outlines of the understanding remain deliberately blurred. The available documents contain no detailed technical specifications, name no governance body and set no adoption timeline, going no further than a convergence towards common principles. Each network will keep its own verification processes and its own decision rules. In the words of Pablo Fourez, Chief Digital Officer at Mastercard: "Interoperability across Know-Your-Agent frameworks is essential to making agentic commerce work at scale, giving merchants, platforms, wallets and issuers a consistent way to recognise trusted agents, verify that actions reflect the user's intent, and preserve accountability across the transaction." Rubail Birwadker, Global Head of Growth Products and Strategic Partnerships at Visa, points to an expected outcome of "more consistency, better accountability, and greater confidence across the payments ecosystem"; Jiang-Ming Yang, Chief Innovation Officer at Ant International, looks instead to an expansion towards richer signals, including capability, behaviour, execution performance and risk data. It remains unclear whether the initiative will grow into a genuinely open standard or settle into a club restricted to the players already at the table, leaving the economic impact on merchants undefined.

Agreeing on the identity of algorithms before delegated commerce goes mainstream is the one moment when a statement of intent costs little. The fact remains that, without binding specifications, the payment giants have inaugurated protocol diplomacy, while sovereignty over transactions stays firmly inside their separate silos.

— Olya