# Banks Race to 'Know Your Agent' as AI Systems Start Shopping and Paying on Their Own > Ant International, Visa, and Mastercard are building a shared framework to verify AI agents making purchases, as the finance industry braces for autonomous systems that could handle trillions of dollars in spending by 2030. - Source: Standard - Canonical URL: https://standard.de.com/article/banks-race-to-know-your-agent-as-ai-systems-start-shopping-and-paying-on-their-o - Author: Chen Li - Section: Innovation - Published: 2026-09-20T07:14:26.409Z - Updated: 2026-09-20T07:14:26.409Z - Tags: AI, Payments, Ant International, Fintech --- As artificial intelligence agents increasingly handle tasks like comparison shopping and completing purchases on behalf of people and businesses, the financial industry is scrambling to answer a question that did not exist a few years ago: how do you verify that an AI agent is who it claims to be, and that it is authorized to spend money in the first place. Ant International, the global arm of Chinese fintech giant Ant Group, has begun working with Visa and Mastercard on what the companies are calling a know your agent framework, an effort to let card networks, digital wallets, and online marketplaces recognize and trust AI agents across different platforms. The work is being coordinated through BuildFin.ai, an industry initiative convened by the Monetary Authority of Singapore. ## Extending an Old Compliance Concept to a New Kind of Customer The framework borrows its name from know your customer rules, the decades old compliance standard banks use to verify the identity of human account holders. Zhuoqun Bian, president of Ant Digital Technologies, argued at the Fortune Leaders Forum in Macau that the same logic now needs to extend to artificial intelligence, saying that in an economy increasingly run by agents, financial institutions need to know their agents just as thoroughly as they know their customers. The goal of the new framework is interoperability, so that an AI agent verified once with a single payment provider does not need to repeat that verification process every time it interacts with a new bank, wallet, or marketplace. Ant International's chief innovation officer has said the industry plans to lean on a broader set of signals over time, including an agent's capabilities, behavior patterns, execution history, and risk profile, to build a fuller picture of trustworthiness beyond a simple identity check. ## Banks Build New Products for a New Kind of Account Holder Ant International has already introduced a business account designed specifically to be held by an AI agent rather than a human, one that verifies the agent's identity, monitors its activity as transactions happen, and allows a human overseer to intervene if something looks wrong. The company has also said it will cover the full cost of losses if an agent is manipulated by a malicious prompt or misinterprets an instruction, a guarantee it says goes further than what other payment companies currently offer. The stakes behind these efforts are significant. Industry estimates suggest AI agents could eventually orchestrate somewhere between 3 trillion and 5 trillion dollars of global consumer spending by 2030, a shift that would remake how payments companies think about fraud, authorization, and liability if the underlying trust and verification systems are not built correctly from the start. --- Originally published by Standard. Free to cite with attribution and a link to https://standard.de.com/article/banks-race-to-know-your-agent-as-ai-systems-start-shopping-and-paying-on-their-o.