Ant International, Visa, and Mastercard have agreed to develop a shared "know your agent" framework for AI-driven payments, citing McKinsey projections that autonomous agents will handle $3 trillion to $5 trillion in global consumer commerce by 2030.
Ant International announced Thursday that it has signed Visa and Mastercard as partners on a new common standard for payments executed by AI agents, citing projections that autonomous systems will reshape how consumers and businesses move money within the decade.
The three companies referenced McKinsey estimates forecasting that AI agents will handle between $3 trillion and $5 trillion in global consumer commerce by 2030, underscoring the scale of the commercial opportunity the partnership is designed to address.
The collaboration centers on what the companies describe as a "know your agent" framework — a set of shared protocols that link each AI agent to a verifiable entity, assess its behavior, and continuously monitor its activity across payment networks.
A core goal is interoperability. Jiang-Ming Yang, chief innovation officer of Ant International, told CNBC that once an agent is registered with one network, it should not need to register separately with the others. "If [an] agent registers with Ant, they don't need to register again with Visa, Mastercard," Yang said.
Yang also cited the risk of AI hallucination as a key motivation. "We need to make sure people feel safe," he said. "Trust is the foundation of the AI transformation."
Pablo Fourez, chief digital officer at Mastercard, echoed that framing. "Interoperability across Know-Your-Agent frameworks is essential to making agentic commerce work at scale," Fourez said in the announcement, stressing the need for a consistent method by which merchants and payment processors can identify which AI agents are trustworthy.
Each of the three companies had already developed its own protocol for AI-driven payments in the twelve months prior to Thursday's announcement. The new initiative is an effort to align those separate systems rather than leave merchants and developers navigating incompatible standards.
The partnership reflects a broader structural shift in how payments flow globally. Digital wallets accounted for 56% of global e-commerce value and 33% of point-of-sale value in 2025, representing more than $13 trillion in spending, according to payment processing company Worldpay. More than 50 e-wallets have partnered with Ant International, which operates the Alipay Plus app across multiple markets.
Ant International separated from Hangzhou-based Ant Group — which runs the Alipay app in mainland China — nearly three years ago. Separately, Alipay announced Wednesday that users in China can now instruct its AI feature to place recurring Starbucks orders on a set schedule, with the app placing the order before prompting the user to confirm payment. Users can also make recurring ride-hailing requests through Didi via the same tool.
The announcement arrives as the broader payments industry grapples with how to build governance frameworks around AI spending before autonomous agents become a mainstream feature of consumer and enterprise software. Whether the three companies can attract additional networks and wallet operators to the shared standard will likely determine how quickly the framework moves from agreement to implementation.
Marc Sabatini is a staff writer at TechEchelon covering enterprise software, cybersecurity, and the regulatory beats that shape both. He focuses on the deal flow and policy decisions that move markets.
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