Ant International, Mastercard, and Visa announced on September 10 that they have begun collaborating on a Know-Your-Agent interoperability framework for agentic commerce2,10. The same day, Akamai disclosed an expanded integration with MuleSoft that connects API runtime security intelligence with MuleSoft's Agent Fabric governance layer across APIs, agents, and MCP servers3,14. McKinsey's QuantumBlack research unit projects that AI agents could mediate $3 trillion to $5 trillion of global consumer commerce by 2030. ANALYSIS Together, the moves sketch a two-tier trust stack for a commerce channel whose projected scale is pushing competitors toward shared identity standards and runtime enforcement simultaneously.
The coincidence is not accidental: as AI agents graduate from recommending products to completing purchases, every participant in the transaction chain needs to know which software is acting, on whose authority, and whether it is behaving as expected.
The big picture
The KYA framework is designed to help card networks, digital wallet ecosystems, agent platforms, and marketplaces streamline agent onboarding and identification across networks, based on shared principles while preserving each network's own verification and decisioning processes13. All three companies already operate proprietary agent protocols: Visa's Trusted Agent Protocol, Mastercard's Verifiable Intent, and Ant International's Agentic Mobile Protocol8. The new collaboration will explore how those separate approaches can work toward common principles rather than replacing each network's individual stack.
The framework will focus on three pillars: operator traceability, shared certification requirements, and continuous transaction monitoring6,7. The companies will work through BuildFin.ai, an industry platform convened by the Monetary Authority of Singapore that brings together financial institutions, technology providers, and researchers working on responsible AI in financial services12.
Ant International's chief innovation officer, Jiang-Ming Yang, framed the stakes around AI reliability: safeguards are needed as agents gain more authority over financial transactions because AI systems can produce incorrect information or take actions users did not intend5. Ant International's Alipay+ wallet gateway currently connects 150 million merchants to over 50 global digital wallets and banking apps, reaching 2 billion user accounts11. Alipay has already begun supporting AI-powered recurring purchases at Starbucks and ride-hailing via DiDi in real-world scenarios.
Below the identity layer, Akamai and MuleSoft are wiring up the enforcement plane. Their expanded bidirectional integration synchronizes API specifications and environment data, surfaces hidden API and MCP server traffic, and feeds behavioral analytics and threat scores into MuleSoft's control plane. More than 20 joint customers already use the integration. The urgency is quantifiable: 87% of organizations reported an API-related security incident during 2025, according to Akamai's 2026 API Security Impact Study.
ANALYSIS The KYA initiative is structured to let competitors cooperate on the identity envelope without surrendering their proprietary risk engines. Each network retains its own verification and decision-making processes. That architecture mirrors how card networks historically handled merchant onboarding: shared message formats, independent underwriting. The difference is speed. The companies said the initiative will enable faster time-to-market and lower integration cost for new agentic services9, language that acknowledges the current fragmentation tax on merchants who would otherwise need to integrate separately with each protocol.
The Akamai-MuleSoft integration occupies a complementary but distinct position. Where KYA addresses who the agent is and whether it is authorized, the API security layer addresses what the agent is doing at runtime. The two layers together form a trust stack: identity and certification at the top, behavioral monitoring and threat scoring at the bottom. The 87% API-incident rate reported by Akamai suggests the runtime layer is not optional.
Singapore's role as convener, through the Monetary Authority of Singapore's BuildFin.ai platform, positions the city-state as a regulatory sandbox for agentic finance standards that could propagate to other jurisdictions. McKinsey's QuantumBlack research unit described agentic commerce as unfolding along a six-level automation curve, from programmed convenience such as subscription replenishment to a still-emerging stage of networked multiagent commerce in which personal agents negotiate directly with specialized agents. ANALYSIS The KYA framework appears calibrated for the middle tiers of that curve, where a single agent acts on behalf of a verified user, rather than the far end where agent-to-agent negotiation would require an entirely different trust model.
What's next
Akamai plans further updates to the MuleSoft integration in the second half of 2026. The KYA collaboration is working through BuildFin.ai's existing Safeguards for Agentic Finance workstream. Digital wallets already accounted for 56% of global e-commerce transaction value in 2025, providing the infrastructure over which agent-initiated payments will flow. Mastercard's chief digital officer, Pablo Fourez, called for consistency across the ecosystem, a word that implies the next deliverable will be a specification document rather than a product launch.