What is Know Your Agent (KYA)?

Know Your Agent is an emerging trust layer for agentic commerce. It helps a payment or commerce system answer which agent is acting, which person or organization stands behind it, what authority it has, and which trust signals can be relied on before and during a transaction.

What changed with KYA interoperability in September 2026?

Ant International, Mastercard and Visa began collaborating on common KYA approaches for agent verification, accountability and risk management. Ant said the work will proceed through BuildFin.ai, an industry platform convened by the Monetary Authority of Singapore, while each payment network keeps its own verification and decisioning processes.

Is KYA the same as an agent wallet or x402?

No. KYA is about identity, operator accountability and trusted authority. A wallet controls credentials and spending authority. A payment rail such as x402 describes how a machine-readable payment is requested and settled. The layers can work together but solve different problems.

How do Visa Trusted Agent Protocol, Mastercard Verifiable Intent and Ant Agentic Mobile Protocol differ?

They overlap in trust but are not interchangeable. Visa Trusted Agent Protocol focuses on authenticated agent-to-merchant communication; Mastercard Verifiable Intent focuses on evidence connecting identity, delegated instructions and action; Ant International's Agentic Mobile Protocol is a broader mobile-wallet agentic payment framework that includes delegation, KYA and agent-to-agent settlement.

Is there one universal KYA standard?

Not yet. The September 2026 collaboration is an interoperability effort rather than one universal certification authority. The participants explicitly preserve each network's own verification and decisioning, while other ecosystems such as NPCI are developing separate agent identity and authorization approaches.

Editorial

Research brief · agent identity · updated 11 September 2026

Know Your Agent is moving from a payment-industry idea toward cross-network infrastructure.

Ant International, Mastercard and Visa are now collaborating on a Know-Your-Agent interoperability framework for card networks, wallets, agent platforms and marketplaces. The important boundary is unchanged: KYA is not a wallet and it is not a payment rail. It is the identity, delegated-authority and accountability layer around an autonomous transaction.

Published 10 September 2026 · updated 11 September 2026 · sources listed below

3 networks

Ant International, Mastercard and Visa collaborating on KYA interoperability

BuildFin.ai

Singapore industry platform being used to advance common trust approaches

10 + 7

AMP Phase I wallet partners + acquiring partners announced around the same rollout

Not one rail

KYA can sit above cards, wallets and machine-payment protocols

What changed on 11 September

The KYA discussion now has a deployment context, not just a standards announcement

Ant International's 11 September AMP rollout gives the KYA effort a much more concrete operating backdrop. Ant said Phase I brings 10 Alipay+ wallet partners serving 1.5 billion accounts together with seven acquiring partners: Adyen, Allinpay, Checkout.com, Fiserv, Global Payments, Nuvei and Worldline. The wider Alipay+ network connects 150 million merchants to more than two billion consumer accounts.

Those numbers describe AMP's rollout, not universal adoption of the new KYA interoperability framework. The reason they matter is scale: the trust layer is being designed while agent payments are moving into wallet and acquiring infrastructure that already reaches large consumer and merchant populations.

Ant also said the KYA collaboration with Mastercard and Visa will proceed through BuildFin.ai, an industry platform convened by the Monetary Authority of Singapore, and will build on Singapore's Safeguards for Agentic Finance at Runtime work. The stated objective is common approaches to agent verification, accountability and risk management while each network retains its own approval and risk decisions.

Read the AMP explainer Compare the UPI agent-registry approach

The trust gap

Capability is arriving faster than willingness to delegate money

Visa's 9 September Trust Index gives the identity-and-intent debate a useful demand signal. In a Harris Poll survey of 2,065 U.S. adults fielded 26–28 May 2026, 72% said they had used an AI assistant, but only 23% trusted generative AI to handle payment transactions on their behalf. Visa reported 61% would trust Visa to handle agentic transactions. The brand-specific result is Visa-sponsored research, but the wider gap is the relevant infrastructure signal.

72%

U.S. respondents who had used an AI assistant

23%

who trusted GenAI to handle payment transactions for them

61%

who said they would trust Visa to handle agentic transactions

Source: Visa Trust Index, Harris Poll Omnibus, U.S. adults, 26–28 May 2026. Payment-brand question base was 1,028–1,034 per brand tested.

What KYA is trying to solve

A merchant needs more than a valid payment credential

When software can discover a product and complete a purchase, the counterparty needs to know whether it is dealing with a recognized agent, which person or organization operates that agent, and whether the action is consistent with delegated authority. A successful card authorization or stablecoin transfer does not answer all of those questions by itself.

Interoperable KYA is therefore about reusable trust signals rather than one global gatekeeper. A card network, wallet, agent platform and marketplace should be able to recognize enough common evidence to reduce repeated onboarding, while still applying their own fraud, compliance and approval rules.

The practical model is continuous rather than one-and-done: establish the agent and operator relationship, bind authority to a task or policy, watch behavior and transaction signals, then preserve evidence for reconciliation or dispute.

Protocol map

KYA interoperability crosses several different trust and payment approaches

Visa Trusted Agent Protocol, Mastercard Verifiable Intent and Ant International's Agentic Mobile Protocol should not be collapsed into one standard: each starts from a different part of the transaction. NPCI's separately reported Unified Agentic Protocol adds another model centered on authorization and registry controls for UPI.

Approach	Primary job	What it adds	Current scope
Visa Trusted Agent Protocol	Agent ↔ merchant trust	Helps merchants distinguish recognized commerce agents from malicious automation and exchange trusted agent information during the transaction flow.	A Visa commerce-trust framework; separate from KYA interoperability itself.
Mastercard Verifiable Intent	Delegated intent and auditability	Links the authorizing person, their instructions and the resulting agent action into privacy-preserving evidence that can be checked later.	Protocol-agnostic delegated-intent evidence; designed to interoperate with other commerce stacks.
Ant Agentic Mobile Protocol (AMP)	Mobile-wallet agentic payments	Connects agents to wallets and mobile services while combining delegation controls, KYA, transaction protection and agent-to-agent settlement.	Open-source protocol; Phase I rollout announced across 10 wallets and 7 acquirers in September 2026.
NPCI Unified Agentic Protocol (planned)	UPI agent authorization	Reported work includes identification, authorization and a registry for AI agents transacting on UPI.	Separate Indian initiative reported in September 2026 and still developing.

KYA vs wallet vs payment rail

Six questions an autonomous transaction has to answer

Layer	Question	Typical evidence
Discovery	What can this service or agent do?	agent metadata, MCP/A2A descriptions, OpenAPI, directories
Identity / KYA	Which agent is acting, for whom, and can that relationship be trusted?	operator traceability, certification, identity attestations, risk signals
Intent	What exactly did the user or business authorize?	mandates, limits, verifiable intent, task constraints
Wallet / credentials	What can the agent spend or sign?	tokenized credentials, keys, policy, caps
Payment rail	How is value requested and settled?	cards, wallets, x402 and other machine-payment protocols
Delivery / audit	Did the paid action succeed and can it be reconciled?	receipts, result schemas, settlement and delivery evidence

What KYA does not mean

Not a finished universal standard

The September interoperability work is a collaboration. The networks still preserve their own verification and decisioning.

Not KYC with a new acronym

KYC identifies a customer or legal entity. KYA adds the software actor, its operator, delegated authority and transaction signals around automated action.

Not a replacement for wallet policy

A trusted agent can still be over-permissioned. Spending caps, approved counterparties, credential isolation and revocation remain necessary.

Not a replacement for payment semantics

Identity does not tell a machine the price, asset, network, challenge format or retry rules. Payment protocols still have that job.

Implementation path

Make identity useful to the systems that actually select, authorize and pay

Publish machine-readable capability

Give agents a stable description of what the service can do before identity or payment is needed.

Bind operator and authority

Keep a durable link between the agent, accountable principal and the scope of delegated action.

Carry intent into payment

Make budget, counterparty, product and re-confirmation conditions survive the jump from planning to checkout.

Preserve delivery evidence

Join authorization, payment and successful result evidence so disputes and repeat purchases are auditable.

Make a service discoverable by agents Design safe agent payments Autonomous procurement Browse zFinia machine APIs Inspect the OpenAPI contract