Know your agent (KYA)
Know your agent, KYA, is the check that tells a bank, a card network or a merchant which AI agent is acting and who answers for it. It extends know your customer to software that pays: the person behind the agent still passes KYC, and the agent gets its own verified identity and spending limits. Dated events on payments are in the calendar below.
What a KYA check covers
An agent has no passport, so the checks of KYC do not fit it. Skyfire, which sells KYA identity tokens for agents, describes three parts: binding the agent to its developer, the deploying firm or the user; verifying the agent's machine-readable credential and its permitted scope; and deciding at the moment of use whether a given payment or request is allowed, based on amount, spending limits and risk signals.
The result is an identity the agent can show to a merchant or a bank in each request. Visa's Trusted Agent Protocol and Mastercard Agent Pay do this with signed web requests and a registry of approved agents, which lets a merchant tell a registered shopping agent from a scraping bot.
Visa, Mastercard and Ant International
Ant International, Mastercard and Visa have started work on a know your agent interoperability framework, so that an agent verified on one network can be recognized on another. Each network keeps its own verification and decisions. The work covers tracing every agent to a validated operator, cardholder or business, shared certification requirements for agents, and ongoing monitoring with identity and transaction signals.
The three companies bring their own protocols: Visa's Trusted Agent Protocol, Mastercard's Verifiable Intent and Ant International's Agentic Mobile Protocol. They work through BuildFin.ai, a platform convened by the Monetary Authority of Singapore, and build on a framework called Safeguards for Agentic Finance at Runtime.
KYA in European compliance
No EU law uses the term yet. The duties it touches are already there: customer due diligence under the anti-money laundering rules stays with the person or firm behind the agent, and strong customer authentication under PSD2 still applies to the payment. KYA adds the link between that verified customer and the software acting for it.
For banks this is a question for the compliance and fraud teams. A payment from a known agent with a known owner and a signed mandate from the Agent Payments Protocol carries more evidence than a card-not-present payment typed by an unknown hand. The EU Digital Identity Wallet is one place where verified credentials for people and firms already exist.
Upcoming payments events in Germany
What is know your agent?
Know your agent is the verification of an AI agent and of the person or company responsible for it, before the agent pays or acts. The check also sets which payments the agent may make.
Does KYA replace KYC?
No. KYC verifies the customer, and KYA verifies the agent that acts for that customer. A bank needs both: the customer's identity under anti-money laundering rules and the agent's link to that customer.
Who is building KYA standards?
The card networks lead: Visa with the Trusted Agent Protocol, Mastercard with Agent Pay and Verifiable Intent, and both with Ant International on a shared framework. Identity firms such as Skyfire sell KYA tokens to agent developers.
Know your agent and Finance Loop
Finance Loop connects the compliance and payment teams that have to approve agent payments with the developers who build the agents. Finance Loop covers KYA in its Risk & Compliance and Payments & Digital Money tracks. Identity providers can present their approach in a sponsored webinar, and compliance people join through the membership.
Finance Loop is a professional network and has the goal of driving the adoption of emerging technologies in finance, such as AI, digital payments, cloud and blockchain solutions. Finance Loop helps its members build skills and personal networks in these fields: Investment & Digital Assets, Payments & Digital Money, Digital Infrastructure & Sovereignty, and Risk & Compliance.