Know Your Agent: How banks, networks, and builders are drafting the rules for autonomous AI payments

Financial firms have spent decades perfecting Know Your Customer (KYC) rules. Their next compliance challenge is Know Your Agent (KYA). On Sept. 6, Ant International announced a collaboration with Mastercard and Visa to build a KYA interoperability framework through BuildFin.ai, an industry platform convened by the Monetary Authority of Singapore Fortune. The goal is to let card networks, digital wallets, and marketplaces recognize trusted AI agents across ecosystems. This matters because McKinsey projects that AI agents could orchestrate as much as $5 trillion in global consumer spending by 2030 Fortune, and current payment infrastructure was designed for humans.

The Know Your Agent Framework: What Changed on Sept. 6

Zhuoqun Bian, president of Ant Digital Technologies, warned at the Fortune Leaders Forum in Macau that "in the agent economy, you need to know your agents. Who's the agent? Who does it belong to? Who authorized it?" Fortune. The new framework aims to answer those questions by creating an interoperability layer where trusted agents can be verified across Visa, Mastercard, digital wallets, and marketplaces. The work will happen under BuildFin.ai, which is tied to MAS-led regulatory initiatives to standardize agent trust and compliance Fortune.

Why AI Agents Break Existing Payment Infrastructure

The International Monetary Fund flagged a fundamental tension in an April note: AI agents are probabilistic and adaptive, meaning the same prompt can yield different answers, while payment systems must return the same answer every time Fortune. Payment rails, from card networks to real-time gross settlement (RTGS) systems, rely on predictable rules, legal certainty, and clear accountability. Benson Wong, managing director at JPMorgan Private Bank, noted that "it's always around the operating model, the processes, and the compliance and the controls" that problems emerge, not the agent technology itself Fortune. The risk scales with autonomy: an information-seeking agent giving a wrong answer is embarrassing; an autonomous payment agent with flawed workflows has vastly scaled impacts.

What This Means for AI Builders

If you are building AI agents that handle money, you need to design for explicit ownership, authorization, and audit trails. The KYA framework suggests that payment networks will require agents to carry verifiable identity credentials, similar to how a credit card carries a PAN. Developers should anticipate that payment rails will demand deterministic responses from agents, even when the underlying model is probabilistic. That means wrapping agent decisions in clear validation and fallback logic. BuildFin.ai may become a centralized anchor for agent trust, providing on-ramps for agent registration and compliance checks across ecosystems Fortune. Interoperability standards across card networks, wallets, and marketplaces will be essential for reliable agent-based transactions.

Caveats and Uncertainties

This framework was announced on Sept. 6 but is not yet deployed. The $5 trillion forecast comes from McKinsey and is not a guarantee. Regulatory acceptance, technical feasibility, and cross-network agent recognition are still evolving. Builders should treat this as a signal of where payment infrastructure is heading, not as a ready-to-use standard. The evidence here is drawn from the Fortune article and related industry commentary; details of the partnership and governance may change as the initiative matures Fortune.