Visa, Mastercard, Ant Agree on AI Agent Payment Standards for $5T Market

Three of the biggest names in global payments just agreed on something rare: a shared rulebook for machines. Ant International, Visa, and Mastercard announced they will work together on common AI agent payment standards, aiming to build a way to identify, verify, and monitor the software agents that are starting to shop, book, and pay on behalf of real people. According to McKinsey projections, AI agents may end up managing anywhere from $3 trillion to $5 trillion of consumer commerce worldwide by 2030, a forecast large enough to accelerate payment leaders’ push toward interoperability faster than they normally would.

Key takeaways

• Ant International, Visa, and Mastercard are jointly building common standards to identify, verify, and monitor AI agents that initiate payments.
• The new Know Your Agent framework lets an agent registered with one payment provider skip re-registration with the others.
• McKinsey estimates AI agents could process $3 trillion to $5 trillion in global consumer commerce by 2030.
• Visa’s Intelligent Commerce Connect and Mastercard’s Agent Connect with Agent Pay are already running as separate, competing infrastructures.
• Ant International’s Alipay+ platform links more than 50 digital wallets worldwide, widening the reach of agentic commerce payments.

Ant International, Visa, and Mastercard Collaborate on AI Agent Payment Standards

The core of this partnership is trust: the three companies want a consistent way to confirm that an AI agent requesting a payment is legitimate and acting on behalf of a real customer. Ant International, Visa, and Mastercard plan to build shared methods for linking each agent to a valid entity, evaluating its behavior, and tracking its activity over time. This matters because as AI agents take on more purchasing power, merchants and processors need a reliable signal for who — or what — is actually on the other end of a transaction.

Building the Know Your Agent Framework

The centerpiece of the collaboration is the Know Your Agent framework, a system designed so an agent that has already verified its identity with one payment provider doesn’t have to repeat that process elsewhere. “If [an] agent registers with Ant, they don’t need to register again with Visa, Mastercard,” said Jiang-Ming Yang, chief innovation officer at Ant International, in comments reported by CNBC. That kind of portability could save time and friction for developers building shopping agents, while giving merchants a single, trusted reference point instead of juggling separate verification systems for every platform.

Why Interoperability and Trust Matter

Pablo Fourez, chief digital officer at Mastercard, framed interoperability as the make-or-break factor for scaling this kind of commerce. “Interoperability across Know-Your-Agent frameworks is essential to making agentic commerce work at scale,” Fourez said, according to CNBC, adding that merchants and payment companies need a consistent way to recognize which AI agents they can trust. Yang echoed the stakes in blunter terms, noting that AI systems can hallucinate or take actions users never intended — which is exactly why safeguards need to arrive before, not after, agents gain real financial authority. “Trust is the foundation of the AI transformation,” he said.

AI Payment Infrastructures Built by Visa and Mastercard

Before this joint standard-setting effort, each company had already spent the past year building its own separate rails for machine-led payments — a sign of how competitive and fast-moving the space has become even as the industry now pushes toward shared rules.

Visa’s Intelligent Commerce Connect and Stablecoin Push

Visa introduced Intelligent Commerce Connect in April, folding payment initiation, tokenization, authentication, and spending controls into infrastructure purpose-built for AI agents. The system lets an agent search for products and complete a purchase on a customer’s behalf while still running through Visa’s existing network and security tools. Visa expanded the effort in June with new AI and stablecoin settlement capabilities, including a partnership with OpenAI to support payments inside agentic commerce experiences. By that point, Visa’s stablecoin settlement activity had reached a $7 billion annualized run rate, crypto.news previously reported.

Mastercard’s Agent Connect and Agent Pay

This week Mastercard responded by rolling out Agent Connect, a platform offering merchants one unified integration point covering product discovery, cart building, and payments approved by customers on AI shopping systems. Working in tandem with Mastercard’s Agent Pay, Agent Connect relies on tokenized permissions to document customer consent whenever an AI is authorized to buy something, allowing merchants to verify that a given transaction truly matches what the customer originally approved. Mastercard had already unveiled a related network, Agent Pay for Machines, in June with backing from more than 30 payment, blockchain, and technology firms, including Ripple, Coinbase, Stripe, Adyen, and the Solana Foundation. That network supports high-volume, low-value transactions initiated by autonomous software, with users setting spending limits and settlement conditions that can run through conventional card networks or stablecoin rails.

Ant International’s Role and Alipay+ Platform

Ant International brings a different kind of scale to the table. Through Alipay+, its cross-border payment and digitalization platform, the company connects more than 50 digital wallets globally — a footprint that matters especially in markets where e-wallets, not physical cards, are the default way people pay.

Global Digital Wallet Connectivity via Alipay+

That distinction is significant because Visa and Mastercard dominate card transactions in developed economies, but many emerging markets rely far more heavily on e-wallets. Digital wallets accounted for 56% of global e-commerce transaction value and 33% of point-of-sale value in 2025, according to Worldpay data cited by the companies, with total spending through the method topping $13 trillion. As wallets increasingly link to cards and other funding sources, AI payment systems now have multiple potential routes to complete a transaction, which is part of why interoperability between systems has become such a priority.

Consumer AI Payment Use Cases on Alipay

The standards effort is landing just as Ant Group’s Alipay app — Ant International separated from Hangzhou-based Ant Group nearly three years ago — starts rolling AI-assisted buying tools out to everyday users. Alipay said users can now set up recurring purchases through an AI feature, telling the app something like “buy me a Starbucks iced Americano at 10 a.m. every day.” The system places the order at the scheduled time and then prompts the customer to complete payment. The same AI tool also lets users make recurring ride-hailing requests through Didi, stretching the automated pattern from retail purchases into transportation.

Market Potential and Safeguards for AI Agent Payments

McKinsey’s projection — $3 trillion to $5 trillion in AI-agent-handled consumer commerce by 2030 — is the number driving urgency across the industry. It’s a big enough figure to explain why three competitors that would normally guard their own payment rails closely are choosing to cooperate on identity and trust instead of fighting over it alone.

That said, the scale of opportunity comes with an obvious catch: agents acting with real financial authority need airtight safeguards, precisely because AI systems can generate wrong information or take unintended actions. Yang’s comments about hallucination risk aren’t just caution for caution’s sake — they point to why the Know Your Agent framework focuses on verifying identity and monitoring behavior rather than simply enabling faster transactions. Whether that trust layer can scale across Visa’s, Mastercard’s, and Ant International’s separately built systems is the next test for agentic commerce, and it’s one the industry hasn’t fully answered yet.

FAQ

What is the purpose of the Know Your Agent framework?

It allows AI agents registered with one payment provider to avoid repeated registration with others, ensuring seamless interoperability across the payment ecosystem.

How are Visa and Mastercard implementing AI-driven payment infrastructures?

Visa launched Intelligent Commerce Connect to support autonomous payments with tokenization and spending controls, while Mastercard launched Agent Connect and Agent Pay to enable AI-led transactions backed by tokenized customer authorizations.

What role does Ant International play in the AI payments ecosystem?

Ant International provides access to more than 50 digital wallets globally through its Alipay+ platform, extending the reach of agentic commerce payments into markets where e-wallets dominate over card payments.

What is the projected scale of AI agent involvement in global commerce?

McKinsey projects that AI agents could handle between $3 trillion and $5 trillion in global consumer commerce by 2030, a figure the three companies cited as justification for building shared trust standards now.

Article produced with the assistance of artificial intelligence and reviewed by the editorial team.