Ant International has announced the global rollout of its Agentic Mobile Protocol, an open protocol that lets AI agents make payments through digital wallets. Phase one includes 10 Alipay+ wallets with 1.5 billion accounts and seven acquirers, among them Adyen, Checkout.com, Fiserv, Global Payments, Nuvei and Worldline. Ant, Mastercard and Visa are starting work on a shared Know-Your-Agent interoperability framework. The protocol is now available as open source on GitHub.

What it means: Payments made by AI agents are moving from pilots to shared rules. The core problem is trust: merchants and banks need to know who the agent is, whom it acts for and how much it is authorised to spend. The work by Ant, Mastercard and Visa on a common agent identification framework matters, because without a shared language each network would build its own system and merchants would have to support several. With Worldline, which has a strong presence in Greece through its partnership with Eurobank, and Nuvei among the acquirers, these capabilities could eventually reach European merchants. For Greek shops serving Asian tourists through Alipay+, agent-initiated payments could become a new source of transactions. They also raise questions about strong customer authentication under PSD2 and about liability when something goes wrong. The protocol's model, where users authorise a task rather than handing over their account, is close to the logic of European rules. Supervisors are likely to demand clear limits and records for every transaction.

Read the original on Ant International

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