AI Agents Are Getting Their Own Bank Accounts
Looking to strengthen its bond with merchants, Ant International is getting bank accounts for artificial intelligence agents.
Account for Agent sits inside WorldFirst, Ant’s global account brand, according to a Friday (Sept. 18) press release. The account runs on know your agent smart contracts, with live monitoring and the ability to intervene in an agent’s activity.
The account arrived with nearly 100 AI products across payments, accounts, foreign exchange and treasury. Ant International CEO Peng Yang presented the stack to more than 1,100 executives at the company’s VOYAGE merchant event in Shanghai, the release said.
Two products sit next to the account. AgentSafePay carries a 100% fund guarantee, according to the release. It covers losses from prompt injection, intent misinterpretation and other agent-specific failures. The Agentic Mobile Protocol settles agent-to-agent payments as small as $0.000001. The protocol has 10 wallet partners and seven acquirers in its first phase. It plugs into a network that links 150 million merchants to more than 2 billion consumer accounts.
Ant’s merchants already use AI. The company’s own figures showed that 89.5% of merchant clients using its global digital payment and financial services brand Antom deployed Ant’s FinAI products in the past 12 months, the release said. AI assisted 81.4% of payment tasks. These figures are not independently audited.
Checks Built for People Face Agents
Payment systems verify people and companies. An agent is neither. AI agents now sit between the person and the payment, a position existing controls weren’t built for, the World Economic Forum said in July. Financial institutions will need to know when an agent was involved, what it was cleared to do, and whether the action traces back to a real human or business decision.
Ant’s protocol answers with permissions. Users authorize a single task and keep the account itself. They see and control the agent in real time, according to the Friday press release.
Stripe built toward the same point from the consumer side. In April, the company upgraded its Link wallet so users can connect AI agents and let them pay without exposing payment credentials, PYMNTS reported. Users get a notification to approve each spend request.
The volume is still small. Stripe and Circle are building payment systems for agent transaction volumes that don’t exist yet, Bloomberg reported March 7. A research scenario imagining agents routing around card fees sent Visa, Mastercard and American Express shares down as much as 5% in a single session.
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Rival Rails Compete for Agent Traffic
The rails are splitting into camps.
Stripe, Coinbase and Cloudflare launched a nonprofit foundation to govern x402, an open-source protocol that lets software pay instantly without human involvement, PYMNTS reported.
Meanwhile, Tempo, a payment-focused blockchain incubated by Stripe and cryptocurrency venture firm Paradigm, introduced an open standard for machine payments in March, PYMNTS reported March 18.
Ant runs a different route. Its protocol moves through mobile wallets and acquirers. Its blockchain settlement platform, WhaleRTP, processed 45% of the company’s cross-border volume in 2025, according to the Friday press release.
The card networks hold a third position. Visa has its Trusted Agent Protocol, and Mastercard has Verifiable Intent. The two networks and Ant are working to develop a know your agent interoperability framework, PYMNTS reported Sept. 10. The framework is meant to streamline agent onboarding and identification across card networks, wallets, agent platforms and marketplaces.
“Interoperability across know your agent frameworks is essential to making agentic commerce work at scale, giving merchants, platforms, wallets and issuers a consistent way to recognize trusted agents, verify that actions reflect the user’s intent, and preserve accountability across the transaction,” Mastercard Chief Digital Officer Pablo Fourez said in a press release at the time.
Each network keeps its own verification and decisioning, the release said. The work runs through BuildFin.ai, an industry platform convened by the Monetary Authority of Singapore.
AgentSafePay is the industry’s only product with a fund-back guarantee against agent-specific losses, according to Ant’s Friday press release, which gave no claim terms, caps or exclusions.
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