Visa, Mastercard and Ant International Launch AI-Agent Trust Framework to Scale $3‑$5 trillion Commerce

Visa, Mastercard and Ant International, a Chinese fintech firm, announced they have begun collaborating on a Know-Your-Agent (KYA) interoperability framework meant to help card networks, digital wallets, agent platforms and marketplaces verify and recognize AI agents across payment systems. The companies cited McKinsey projections that AI agents could orchestrate $3 trillion to $5 trillion of global consumer commerce by 2030, and each brings an existing protocol into the effort: Visa's Trusted Agent Protocol, Mastercard's Verifiable Intent and Ant International's Agentic Mobile Protocol.

The push for shared verification comes as consumer trust in AI-driven spending is still limited. Visa's separate Trust Index research, a survey of 2,065 US consumers covered by Forbes, found that only 23% trust a generative-AI agent to handle a payment on their own, though that acceptance nearly triples to 61% when Visa's own brand is attached to the transaction. "Trust will be foundational to driving agentic commerce adoption," said Oliver Jenkyn, Visa's Group President, in comments tied to that research.

On the KYA framework itself, Mastercard's chief digital officer Pablo Fourez said "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 recognize trusted agents. Ant International's chief innovation officer Jiang-Ming Yang said interoperable KYA is "critical for securing trust for our payment partners, platforms and merchants in agentic commerce," and that an agent registered with one network could avoid re-registering with the others. Visa's Rubail Birwadker, its global head of growth products and strategic partnerships, framed the effort as building on "the trust frameworks that make agentic commerce possible".

Analysts will watch how quickly merchants, wallets and AI developers adopt the shared KYA standards, since aligning identity and risk rules across competing networks has historically moved slowly. Early market attention is already visible: Mastercard's social-media mention volume is running 3.1 standard deviations above its recent baseline this week (SentiSense data, 2026-09-10). Success could position the three companies as a default trust layer for agentic commerce, while a slow rollout could leave room for other payment or AI infrastructure providers to set the standard first.