A MasterCard card and a Visa card are seen in this illustrated photo taken on March 29, 2024 in Krakow, Poland.
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Fintech company Ant International announced Thursday that it had signed the deal. visa and master card We look forward to collaborating on a new standard for payments made through AI agents, which will increasingly be used by consumers and businesses.
In a statement, the companies cited McKinsey’s prediction that AI agents will process $3 trillion to $5 trillion of global consumer commerce by 2030, but Ant International’s chief innovation officer Jiang Ming Yang told CNBC that “we need to make sure people feel safe” because AI agents have the potential to cause hallucinations.
“Trust is the foundation of AI transformation,” Yang said in an interview with CNBC.
Building trust in AI payments
Ant said in the announcement that the new partnership focuses on how payments companies can “know your agents,” including connecting each agent to a valid entity and building common standards to evaluate and monitor each agent’s behavior.
This is an effort to increase interoperability for users of different systems.
“Once agents register with Ant, they don’t need to register with Visa or Mastercard again,” Yang said.
In the past 12 months, Visa, Mastercard, and Ant International have each announced their own systems, called protocols, for AI agents to securely complete payments.
While US credit card giants Visa and Mastercard dominate transactions in developed countries, many developing countries tend to use electronic payment systems known as e-wallets. More than 50 of these e-wallets are affiliated with Ant International, which operates the “Alipay+” system.
These digital wallets are also starting to be linked to credit cards and are becoming a more popular payment method than physical cards. Digital wallets will account for 56% of global e-commerce value and 33% of point-of-sale value in 2025, with spending exceeding $13 trillion, according to payment processor Worldpay.
Now we need to safely develop technology for AI-driven spending.
“Interoperability between Know-Your-Agent frameworks is essential to making agent commerce work at scale,” said Pablo Forest, Mastercard’s chief digital officer, stressing the need for a consistent way for merchants and payment processors to know which AI agents they can trust.
Ant International was separated from Hangzhou-based Ant Group, which operates mobile payment app Alipay in mainland China, about three years ago.
Alipay announced Wednesday that users can now set up recurring Starbucks orders through one of its AI features.
According to a press release, users can tell the app to “buy me a Starbucks Iced Americano every day at 10 a.m.” and the order will be placed at a scheduled time at the specified time before prompting the user to complete payment.
Users can now also make recurring ride requests from Didi through the same Alipay AI tool.
—CNBC’s Matthew Tan contributed to this report.
