Ant, Visa, and Mastercard Partner on AI Payment Standards

Ant International, Visa, and Mastercard are joining forces to establish an interoperable Know Your Agent framework and common security standards for AI-driven transactions, tackling a sector projected to handle trillions of dollars by the end of the decade.

"Trust is the foundation of the AI transformation," said Jiang-Ming Yang, chief innovation officer of Ant International, noting that potential for hallucination means "we need to make sure people feel safe."

Scaling Agentic Commerce

The initiative addresses the rapid rise of autonomous software agents designed to execute commercial transactions on behalf of human users. As these tools evolve from simple assistants into active buyers, traditional payment infrastructure faces new vulnerabilities related to authorization and fraud prevention.

"Interoperability across Know-Your-Agent frameworks is essential to making agentic commerce work at scale," said Pablo Fourez, chief digital officer at Mastercard.

To support these standards, the companies pointed to long-term projections by McKinsey anticipating that autonomous AI agents will handle between $3 trillion and $5 trillion in global consumer commerce by 2030. Establishing a unified protocol aims to prevent fragmented security systems as automated purchasing grows.

Digital Wallet Baseline and Market Share

The push for new agentic protocols builds upon an existing digital payments ecosystem dominated by electronic wallets. According to Worldpay data cited by the partner companies, digital wallets accounted for 56% of global e-commerce value and 33% of point-of-sale value in 2025.

Across those channels, total spending surpassed $13 trillion during the year. The proposed Know Your Agent standards are designed to integrate cleanly within these existing wallet infrastructures rather than requiring entirely separate payment rails.

What Is at Stake for Global Networks

The collaboration unites major competitors across traditional card networks and digital financial services in an effort to preempt regulatory friction and security risks. By defining shared verification standards early, Ant International, Visa, and Mastercard intend to control the underlying architecture for machine-to-machine commerce before autonomous transaction volumes accelerate past legacy compliance limits.