Ant International partners with Visa, Mastercard on developing AI payments

MasterCard and Visa cards are seen in this illustration photo taken in Krakow, Poland on March 29, 2024.

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Fintech company Ant International announced Thursday it has signed on and to collaborate on a new standard for payments made via AI agents, in a bet that they will be used more and more by consumers and businesses.

In a statement, the companies cited McKinsey projections expecting

"Trust is the foundation of the AI transformation," Yang told CNBC in an interview.

The new collaboration will focus on how the payment companies can "know your agent," Ant said in the announcement, which includes building common standards that link each agent to a valid entity, assess each agent's behavior and monitor them.

It's an effort to increase interoperability for users of the different systems.

"If [an] agent registers with Ant, they don't need to register again with Visa, Mastercard," Yang said.

In the past 12 months, and

These digital wallets have also started to link to credit cards and are becoming a more common way to pay than with physical cards.

Alipay announced Wednesday that users can set regular requests to make Starbucks orders via one of its AI features.

Users can tell the app to "buy me a Starbucks iced Americano at 10 a.m. every day," which will regularly place the order at the designated time, before prompting the user to complete the payment, according to a press release.

Users can currently also make recurring ride-hailing requests from Didi via the same Alipay AI tool.

— CNBC's Matthew Tan contributed to this report.