Visa, Mastercard, Ant Group band together for agentic commerce framework

Visa, Mastercard, and Ant International, the global arm of China's Ant Group, announced a "know-your-agent (KYA) interoperability framework" this week to support agentic commerce operations. The three payment networks, with combined annual revenue of more than $77 billion, said the framework is designed to help card networks, digital wallet ecosystems, agent platforms, and marketplaces streamline agent onboarding and identification across networks. Ant International said the trio will "work towards common principles" after each had previously launched its own protocols for allowing agents to independently make purchases.

The need for standards to encourage widespread AI adoption has often created unlikely bedfellows, and a new partnership between Visa, Mastercard, and Alipay developer Ant International is no different. The three payment networks, with a combined annual revenue of more than $77 billion, announced their “know-your-agent KYA interoperability framework” https://www.ant-intl.com/en/news/detail/?id=ant-international-mastercard-and-visa-initiate-collaboration-on-know-your-agent-interoperability-to-scale-agentic-commerce&redirect=news&tag=ALIPAY%2B%2CAI%2CPARTNERSHIP&ref=thestack.technology to support agentic commerce operations this week. Ant International, the global arm of China’s Ant Group, said the effort will see the trio “work towards common principles” after previously launching their own protocols for allowing agents to independently make purchases. The new framework will be “designed to help card networks, digital wallet ecosystems, agent platforms and marketplaces streamline agent onboarding and identification across networks”, it said on Thursday.