Daily News 19

Tag: Know-Your-Agent

  • Ant International Joins Visa, Mastercard to Develop AI Agent Payment Standards

    Ant International Joins Visa, Mastercard to Develop AI Agent Payment Standards

    Ant International has partnered with Visa and Mastercard to develop common standards for identifying and monitoring AI agents as autonomous software takes on a larger role in global payments. The collaboration aims to create an interoperable “Know Your Agent” framework that lets merchants and payment providers verify which AI agents are behind transactions and whether they are authorized to act.

    Framework addresses projected growth in agentic commerce

    The initiative arrives as payment companies prepare for AI systems that can search for products, place orders, and make payments for consumers and businesses. Ant cited McKinsey projections that AI agents could handle between $3 trillion and $5 trillion of global consumer commerce by 2030.

    Jiang-Ming Yang, chief innovation officer at Ant International, emphasized that safeguards will be essential as agents gain more authority over financial transactions because AI systems can produce incorrect information or take actions users did not intend.

    “Trust is the foundation of the AI transformation,” Yang told CNBC.

    Interoperable identity system reduces friction

    Under the collaboration, Ant International, Visa, and Mastercard plan to establish common methods for linking an AI agent to a valid entity, evaluating its behavior, and monitoring its activity. The companies are focusing on interoperability between their separate systems so an agent that has already established its identity with one payment provider would not necessarily have to repeat the process with another.

    “If [an] agent registers with Ant, they don’t need to register again with Visa, Mastercard,” Yang said.

    Such a system would give merchants and payment processors a consistent way to determine which software agent is requesting a transaction and the party on whose behalf it is operating.

    Pablo Fourez, chief digital officer at Mastercard, said interoperability between Know Your Agent frameworks will be needed if agentic commerce is to operate across different platforms.

    “Interoperability across Know-Your-Agent frameworks is essential to making agentic commerce work at scale,” Fourez said, stressing the need for merchants and payment companies to consistently identify AI agents they can trust.

    Each company brings existing agent payment infrastructure

    Each of the three companies has spent the past year developing its own technology for AI-led payments. Mastercard on Wednesday launched Agent Connect, a system that gives merchants a single integration for product discovery, cart creation, and customer-approved payments across AI shopping platforms.

    Agent Connect works with Mastercard Agent Pay, which records customer authority through tokenized permissions when an AI system is allowed to make a purchase. Merchants and payment providers can use the permission to determine whether the transaction falls within instructions provided by the customer.

    Visa builds autonomous payment stack

    Visa has been developing a separate stack for autonomous payments. In April, the company introduced Intelligent Commerce Connect, bringing payment initiation, tokenization, authentication, and spending controls into infrastructure designed for AI agents.

    The system allows agents to search for products and complete transactions on behalf of consumers while using Visa’s existing payment network and security tools. Visa expanded that work in June with new AI and stablecoin capabilities, including a partnership with OpenAI to support payments within agentic commerce experiences. Its stablecoin settlement activity had reached a $7 billion annualized run rate at the time, crypto.news previously reported.

    Mastercard targets machine-to-machine transactions

    Mastercard has taken a similar route through Agent Pay for Machines. The company unveiled the payment network in June with support from more than 30 payment, blockchain, and technology companies, including Ripple, Coinbase, Stripe, Adyen, and the Solana Foundation.

    The network was built for transactions initiated by autonomous software, including high-volume and low-value payments. Users can set spending limits, authorization requirements, and settlement conditions, while transactions can run through conventional payment networks or stablecoin rails.

    Both card companies have consequently been developing controls for a payment environment in which the person buying a product may not directly interact with the merchant’s checkout page.

    Ant International adds digital wallet scale

    Ant International gives the collaboration access to another part of the global payments market through Alipay+, its cross-border payment and digitalization platform. More than 50 electronic wallets have partnered with Ant International through Alipay+, according to the company. Such wallets are widely used in markets where consumers frequently rely on mobile payment systems instead of physical credit or debit cards.

    Digital wallets represented 56% of global e-commerce transaction value and 33% of point-of-sale value in 2025, according to Worldpay data cited by the companies. Total spending through the payment method exceeded $13 trillion.

    Card networks and digital wallets have become increasingly connected as wallets add support for cards and other funding sources, giving AI payment systems multiple routes through which transactions could eventually be completed.

    Stablecoins emerge as machine payment rail

    Visa has already been testing combinations of AI payments and blockchain-based settlement. Wirex joined Visa’s Agentic Ready program in June to test AI agents making stablecoin payments, initially focusing on software subscriptions, marketing spending, and procurement.

    The tests were designed to determine how autonomous software could initiate financial transactions while preserving security controls and user authority.

    Stablecoins have become another part of the infrastructure being developed for machine-led transactions. Visa and Artemis said in July that stablecoins could be suited to low-value machine-to-machine payments, while traditional cards could continue handling consumer purchases.

    Alipay deploys consumer-facing AI ordering

    Ant’s work on payment standards is arriving as its former parent company’s Alipay platform begins putting AI-assisted purchasing tools in front of consumers. Ant International separated from Hangzhou-based Ant Group nearly three years ago. Ant Group operates Alipay, the mobile payment service widely used in mainland China.

    Alipay said Wednesday that users can now create recurring Starbucks requests through one of its AI features.

    “buy me a Starbucks iced Americano at 10 a.m. every day,” according to the announcement. The system can then place the requested order at the scheduled time before asking the customer to complete payment.

    The arrangement keeps the payment approval with the user even though the AI feature handles the recurring order. Alipay users can make recurring ride-hailing requests from Didi through the same AI tool, extending the automated system from retail purchases to transportation services.

  • AI Agents Are Getting Wallets as Compliance Infrastructure Catches Up

    AI Agents Are Getting Wallets as Compliance Infrastructure Catches Up

    AI agents are beginning to hold digital wallets and make payments, but the financial system lacks a standard way to identify one machine counterparty from another. Solowin Holdings signed a memorandum with SC Ventures, Standard Chartered’s venture arm, in April to incubate an AI payments project called AGENPAY. The Hong Kong company, listed on Nasdaq under AXG, is developing Know-Your-Agent, a compliance engine designed to give machine counterparties verifiable identities.

    Can AI agents open bank accounts?

    “Is an agent gonna be able to open a bank account? Is JP Morgan gonna open an account for an agent?” Yat Siu, executive chairman of Animoca Brands, said on the On The Margin podcast. “Probably not gonna happen, right? So how do they do that? They have a wallet. We actually think you know agents with wallets essentially become autonomous economic actors who then basically do not just trade but buy and do stuff. They can use a stablecoin, right? We already have agents that are trading on hyperliquid. I have two hundred and eighty agents now doing all sorts of stuff.”

    Siu estimates that the eventual number of AI agents could reach “anywhere from 50 to 100 billion agents minimum.” He expects financial activity to expand alongside that population.

    “The total advertising, online advertising revenues is around $900 billion a year,” he said. “That’s all gonna shift into a kind of transactional invocation economy powered by agents.”

    “The next step, which is already starting, is that the AI agents start transacting on your behalf. So they pay for things, they sign up for services, they probably handle your financial transactions now,” Varun Kabra, chief growth officer at Concordium, said on On The Margin. “The counterparty on the other side, the airline in this case, or the ticketing platform, whatever it is, they have no way to verify whether a real accountable human is behind the transaction. And that could open a door to fraud, bots acting as humans, agents operating with no accountability.”

    “You’re quickly gonna realize because our entire financial ecosystem was primarily human-centric,” Chandler Fung, co-founder of t54 Labs, said in an interview. “The entire society is a trust business.”

    Most banks still prevent AI agents from accessing customer funds, creating an opening that Solowin spent 2026 targeting.

    “AI doesn’t have a transaction layer right now,” Atul Khekade, co-founder of XDC Network, said in an interview. “AI platforms don’t have a monetization compliance layer that they can use for, like, real transactions to execute actions. insurance companies, banks, fintech providers, airline companies, a lot of them are coming to us now.”

    Thomas Zhu, a Solowin director and co-founder of its AlloyX subsidiary, was an executive director in Goldman Sachs’ securities division from 2015 to 2020. He later led digital assets at China Asset Management (Hong Kong), which listed some of Asia’s first spot bitcoin and ether ETFs in 2024.

    “Without compliant governance, AI-stablecoin integration will remain experimental,” Zhu said in written answers to questions.

    The financial rails behind AI agents

    Solowin’s Bahrain subsidiary received a license from the country’s central bank in June to issue stablecoins, becoming the first company granted approval under that framework. The stablecoin itself has not yet launched.

    “Agents are like fundamentally about outsourcing a purchase and anyone who has ever outsourced a purchase knows that this comes with trade-offs,” Nitya Subramanian, chief executive of wallet infrastructure firm Para, said on On The Margin. “Wallets are ultimately the authorization and control flow layer of anything that’s happening on chain. Every chain, every DeFi primitive, every action that you can take on chain needs to go through a wallet. And I feel like people still don’t fully get that.”

    “I could create a stable coin backed card and give it $200 a week and just have it buy Chipotle,” Subramanian said, describing the spending limits she would impose. “So it’s only allowed to buy my Chipotle bowl every day.”

    “I think in the past 12 months, there’s been over 300 million unique users of stablecoins, which is an absurdly high number,” Patrick Kim, a researcher at crypto data firm Artemis, said on On The Margin, referring to the settlement asset that banks spent 2026 pursuing. “If you told this to someone five years ago, they would look you dead in the eyes and say, you’re bullshitting me, like you’re bluffing.”

    Stablecoin supply stood at $308 billion on Aug. 13, according to Reap’s 2026 stablecoin data. Every major bank is now expected to launch a stablecoin.

    What AI agents could trade

    “Reality is the world that we’ve been living in for crypto for the past few years has been a lot of these, you know, quote unquote unsexy use cases, right? Like bringing private credit on chain, bringing equities on chain,” Kim said.

    Zhu expects AI agents to trade those types of assets, beginning with government bonds and money-market funds before expanding into real estate and private credit. He sees the products being offered to banks as a service rather than developed entirely in-house.

    Solowin operates a tokenization platform called Ferion and backed a funding round for Libeara in April. Libeara is a Singapore-based platform also supported by SC Ventures.

    “You own the token and the token is the asset, you own the asset. It’s different. It’s what we call title tokenization,” Chris Turner, co-founder of impact investment platform Kula, said in an interview, describing the distinction at the center of the $80 billion tokenization market. Most of the market offers a weaker structure, he said: “it’s giving a contractual exposure to the economic upside of that particular asset. But you don’t own the asset.”

    Zhu identified the main challenges as “cross-jurisdictional legal affirmation, custody and regulatory compliance.”

    Solowin’s AI payments business

    Solowin reported revenue of $28.05 million for the year ended March 31, an 895% increase, according to its 6-K filing. AI infrastructure fees accounted for $22.2 million of that total.

    The company’s operating expenses reached $40.14 million, resulting in a net loss of $13.29 million. Solowin also acquired AlloyX for $350 million in stock as it expanded its reach into the UAE, ASEAN and Africa.

    “The last time we had a new financial rail was probably credit cards in the 70s,” Subramanian said. “And so it’s probably the most exciting time in many of our, if not most of our careers to be building in either FinTech or crypto.”

    “if you refuse to access it, if you say I don’t want anything to do with it, that’s no different than saying I don’t want to be on the internet,” Siu said.