Visa, Mastercard and Ant International have announced a joint effort to build a Know-Your-Agent interoperability framework, establishing common rules for identifying, verifying and onboarding AI agents that transact across payment networks1.
The collaboration is the first public attempt by the three payment giants to converge their separate agent-identity protocols: Visa's Trusted Agent Protocol, Mastercard Verifiable Intent and Ant International's Agentic Mobile Protocol. Rather than replacing those individual systems, the parties will explore aligning them on shared principles.
Three pillars of the framework
The Know-Your-Agent framework rests on three mechanisms:
• Cross-network operator traceability, which links each AI agent to a validated operator, cardholder or business so that agent activity can be attributed clearly.
• Shared certification requirements, under which every agent is assessed against defined security and behavioral standards before it can operate on participating networks.
• Continuous transaction monitoring, which evaluates agents on an ongoing basis using a combination of identity and transaction signals.
The stated goal is to reduce duplicative identity-verification work for service providers, agent platforms and marketplaces, cutting integration complexity and accelerating time-to-market for new agentic services while preserving trust and risk controls.
Singapore as the coordination venue
The three organizations will advance the work through BuildFin.ai, an industry platform convened by the Monetary Authority of Singapore that brings together financial institutions, technology providers and researchers to develop responsible AI solutions for financial services. The collaboration builds on the Safeguards for Agentic Finance at Runtime framework.
The initiative is framed against a projection that AI agents will orchestrate between US$3 trillion and US$5 trillion of global consumer commerce by 2030. The framework is designed to support card networks, digital wallet ecosystems, agent platforms and marketplaces as that volume grows.
ANALYSIS By converging on a shared identity layer rather than mandating a single protocol, the three networks are structuring the framework as an interoperability overlay, a design that lowers adoption friction for platforms already integrated with one of the three existing protocols. The choice of the Monetary Authority of Singapore's BuildFin.ai as the coordination venue places the standard-setting process under a regulator that has actively promoted AI governance in financial services, giving the effort a quasi-regulatory anchor even though the framework itself is industry-led.