MasterCard and Visa cards are seen in this illustration photo taken in Krakow, Poland on March 29, 2024.
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Fintech company Ant International announced Thursday it has signed on Visa and Mastercard to collaborate on a new standard for payments made via AI agents, in a bet that they will be used more and more by consumers and businesses.
In a statement, the companies cited McKinsey projections expecting AI agents will handle $3 trillion to $5 trillion of global consumer commerce by 2030. But Jiang-Ming Yang, chief innovation officer of Ant International, told CNBC that AI agents’ potential for hallucination meant “we need to make sure people feel safe.”
“Trust is the foundation of the AI transformation,” Yang told CNBC in an interview.
Building trust in AI payments
The new collaboration will focus on how the payment companies can “know your agent,” Ant said in the announcement, which includes building common standards that link each agent to a valid entity, assess each agent’s behavior and monitor them.
It’s an effort to increase interoperability for users of the different systems.
“If [an] agent registers with Ant, they don’t need to register again with Visa, Mastercard,” Yang said.
In the past 12 months, Visa, Mastercard and Ant International have each announced their own systems, known as protocols, for AI agents to complete payments securely.
While U.S. credit card giants Visa and Mastercard dominate transactions in developed economies, many developing economies tend to use electronic payment systems known as e-wallets. More than 50 of these e-wallets have partnered with Ant International, which runs an “Alipay+” system.
These digital wallets have also started to link to credit cards and are becoming a more common way to pay than with physical cards. Digital wallets accounted for 56% of global e-commerce value and 33% of point-of-sale value in 2025, for more than $13 trillion in spending, according to payment processing company Worldpay.
Now that technology needs to develop securely for AI-driven spending.
“Interoperability across Know-Your-Agent frameworks is essential to making agentic commerce work at scale,” said Pablo Fourez, chief digital officer at Mastercard, stressing the need for a consistent way for merchants and payment processors to recognize which AI agents they can trust.
Ant International separated nearly three years ago from Hangzhou-based Ant Group, which runs the Alipay mobile payments app in mainland China.
Alipay announced Wednesday that users can set regular requests to make Starbucks orders via one of its AI features.
Users can tell the app to “buy me a Starbucks iced Americano at 10 a.m. every day,” which will regularly place the order at the designated time, before prompting the user to complete the payment, according to a press release.
Users can currently also make recurring ride-hailing requests from Didi via the same Alipay AI tool.
— CNBC’s Matthew Tan contributed to this report.
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