From São Paulo on September 10, Ant International, Mastercard, and Visa announced they’d begun building a shared Know-Your-Agent framework, the identity layer that’ll decide which AI shopping bots get to spend money on the world’s two dominant card rails and the biggest wallet ecosystem outside them. The immediate story is payments plumbing. The larger one is that the discovery surface for a huge slice of consumer commerce is being drawn right now, and small merchants are inside the map whether they realize it or not.

The three companies each already had a protocol in flight: Visa’s Trusted Agent Protocol, launched in October 2025 with 12 partners including Adyen, Shopify, and Stripe; Mastercard’s Verifiable Intent, introduced in March 2026 and co-developed with Google; and Ant International’s Agentic Mobile Protocol, released April 28, 2026. KYA is the interoperability seam. “if [an] agent registers with Ant, they don’t need to register again with Visa, Mastercard,” said Jiang-Ming Yang of Ant International. Cross-network operator traceability, shared certification, continuous transaction monitoring: three elements, one passport.

The scale case is McKinsey’s QuantumBlack projection, published January 28, 2026, that AI agents will handle $3 trillion to $5 trillion of global consumer commerce by 2030. Digital wallets, the category Ant’s Alipay+ network sits inside, accounted for 56% of global e-commerce value and 33% of point-of-sale value in 2025, moving more than $13 trillion, according to Worldpay.

“Interoperability across Know-Your-Agent frameworks is essential to making agentic commerce work at scale,” said Pablo Fourez, chief digital officer at Mastercard. “Without trusted identity and explicit permissioning, AI agents cannot participate in commerce at scale,” said Rubail Birwadker, Visa’s SVP, Head of Growth Products and Partnerships.

Regulators are already leaning in. The Monetary Authority of Singapore published its Safeguards for Agentic Finance at Runtime framework on July 3, 2026, via the BuildFin.ai platform. Forkast reports a 4,700% surge in AI-driven traffic to US retail sites, even as an April 2026 Product.ai report found only 14% of consumers trust AI to purchase without verification and 42% won’t trust it above $25.

Forkast’s read is that KYA is high-level intent with no specs, no governance bodies, and no rollout timeline. That’s true, and it’s also how every consequential standard begins. The merchants who show up in an agent’s shortlist a year from now will be the ones whose catalogs, prices, and checkouts are already machine-legible. The rails are being poured. The question is whose storefronts sit on them.

Sources