The KYA Moment: Why Knowing Your Agent Is Becoming Table Stakes

From Human Intent to Delegated Intent

KYA applies the logic of “know your customer” and “know your business” to software. It establishes which agent is acting, who authorized it and under what permissions and limits. In practical terms, it turns delegated intent into something that can be verified rather than inferred. That matters because agents behave exactly like the patterns fraud systems are trained to distrust. They operate continuously, retry efficiently and optimize relentlessly for completion. Without identity and mandate, those behaviors are indistinguishable from bot attacks or account takeover attempts.

New forms of commerce only scale when they fit within the mental and technical models that already govern money. That framing underpins PYMNTS’ coverage of Visa’s agentic commerce strategy, which explores how networks are extending existing identity and risk frameworks to accommodate AI-driven transactions without destabilizing approval rates or consumer confidence.

Karen Webster has addressed this shift directly in her commentary on how AI agents are reshaping discovery and checkout. In “When Chatbots Replace Search Bars, Who Wins at Checkout?”, she argues that as software increasingly intermediates commerce, payments systems must evolve to recognize new actors without breaking trust or inflating friction.

What makes KYA viable now is timing. The identity infrastructure required to support it has matured. W3C Verifiable Credentials v2.0 enable cryptographically signed identity and mandate claims that can move across platforms. NIST SP 800-63-4 modernizes digital identity guidance to support phishing-resistant authentication flows suitable for automation.

Visa’s Trusted Agent Protocol shows how those building blocks come together in payments. TAP allows merchants to signal to issuers that a transaction was initiated by a verified, authorized agent rather than an unknown bot. That point was reinforced in a PYMNTS podcast conversation with Webster on how agentic commerce can scale without undermining trust.

Why KYA Changes Fraud and Approval Economics

Fraud systems are designed to be conservative. When context is missing, controls compensate by declining more transactions. Agent-initiated commerce magnifies that bias because automation looks anomalous by default. Without KYA, issuers see volume without explanation, and the rational response is to tighten controls.

Verified agent identity changes that math. When an agent presents a signed credential bound to a user mandate, issuers gain pre-transaction clarity rather than post-transaction suspicion. That clarity supports higher approval rates, fewer false declines and lower operational friction across the network.

This reflects a broader theme in Karen Webster’s writing: trust in payments is cumulative. Each unnecessary decline erodes confidence, while each frictionless approval reinforces it. In her commentary on how AI is reshaping B2B payments, Webster emphasizes that identity and context are becoming growth enablers rather than compliance obligations.

Loyalty, Value and the Agent Layer

The implications extend beyond fraud into loyalty and value creation. Most loyalty programs today are card-centric, rewarding accounts rather than actions. Agents complicate that model because they act across merchants and categories, often optimizing for price, convenience or rewards on behalf of users.

KYA enables loyalty to move up the stack. Mandates can carry brand rules, earning logic and redemption preferences directly into the authorization flow. A verified shopping agent could automatically apply offers, optimize for a specific rewards program and generate verifiable receipts that support closed-loop measurement, a capability envisioned by credential-backed commerce standards.

As Webster has argued in her broader thought leadership on the creative destruction of the payments business model, the winners will not be those who control trust, but those who make it interoperable.

The mandate for payments leaders is now clear. Identify where agents can act, require strong authentication and KYA proof for delegated transactions, and ensure those signals flow into risk and loyalty systems.