- Ant International’s Phase I agentic payments roster includes 10 Alipay+ wallets and seven acquirers, all Asian.
- No partner has given a go-live date, and Ant has not said how many AMP transactions have settled since April.
Ant International has named the first wallets and acquirers signed up to its agentic payments protocol, and none of them has said when the capability will reach users. The company announced on September 11 that 10 Alipay+ digital wallets and seven acquiring partners would work with its Agentic Mobile Protocol during Phase I in 2026, describing the rollout as proceeding at an accelerated pace. It did not disclose how many AMP transactions have been processed since the protocol launched in April, in which markets, or what marks the end of Phase I.
The wallet list is Alipay, AlipayHK, MPay in Macao, DANA in Indonesia, GCash in the Philippines, KakaoPay and Toss in South Korea, TNG eWallet in Malaysia, TrueMoney in Thailand, and Starryblu in Singapore. The acquirers are Adyen, Allinpay, Checkout.com, Fiserv, Global Payments, Nuvei and Worldline. Ant’s key visual for the announcement refers to eight of the world’s largest acquirers and carries eight logos, the additional one being Antom, Ant International’s own acquiring business. Tech Wire Asia has asked Ant to confirm whether Antom is counted in that total.
What the partners have agreed to is narrower than the framing suggests. The announcement states that the 10 wallets will support AMP in their own agent security architecture, which is a commitment on identity and authorisation rather than a commitment to run agentic checkout. The partner quotes track that distinction.
TNG Digital chief executive Alan Ni said the company is “exploring how this technology could support more convenient experiences” within TNG eWallet, with any future capability introduced responsibly and with clear user authorisation. TrueMoney’s Koravut Pavitpok framed participation as a chance to look at what agentic AI could do to the purchase journey, saying the company sees “an opportunity to explore” it. Only Starryblu and MPay describe AMP in terms that suggest anything running today.
Asked about implementation timelines, regulatory engagement and how liability would work, TNG Digital declined to comment further, saying updates would come through its official channels.
Why wallets matter to agentic payments
The protocols competing for this market have in practice run on cards. OpenAI and Stripe’s Agentic Commerce Protocol handles the checkout handshake, the Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) covers payment consent, and Visa’s Trusted Agent Protocol extends card rails to agents. Mastercard’s Verifiable Intent, announced in March 2026 and co-developed with Google, creates a tamper-resistant record of what a user authorised an agent to do.
Checkout.com’s Asia Pacific general manager Brian Sze made the point directly in Ant’s own announcement, noting that agentic commerce has to date been “largely card-based” and that AMP extends it to wallets. That is the strategic logic behind a roster with no non-Asian wallet on it. In markets where QR wallets carry the volume that cards carry elsewhere, a card-first agentic stack has nothing to plug into. Southeast Asia becomes the proving ground by default.
The scale claims need reading carefully. Ant says the Phase I wallets serve 1.5 billion user accounts and that the wider Alipay+ ecosystem connects 150 million merchants to two billion consumer accounts. These are accounts rather than users, and Alipay in China accounts for a large share of the total. The figures have also moved since April, when Ant put Alipay+ at more than 40 wallet partners and 1.8 billion user accounts. The merchant count has not moved at all.
The acquirers have signed up for everyone
Acquirer support for AMP is real, but it is not exclusive, and several of the same names appear on competing initiatives. Adyen and Worldpay, now part of Global Payments, were among the roughly 60 partners named when Google launched AP2 in September 2025. So was Ant International. Adyen also endorsed the Universal Commerce Protocol at its launch on January 11, 2026, alongside Stripe, Visa, Mastercard and American Express, on a protocol Google co-developed with Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair, Target and Walmart. Signing on to AMP commits an acquirer to supporting one more route to checkout, which is the rational position while no standard has won.
The hedging shows in the wording. Fiserv’s Lia Cao said initiatives like AMP can help accelerate innovation, and Global Payments chief product officer Cindy Turner used similar phrasing about supporting initiatives that advance agentic commerce. Neither statement names AMP as the route the company is building on.
A trust framework without a timetable
Alongside the Phase I list, Ant said it has begun collaboration with Mastercard and Visa on a Know-Your-Agent interoperability framework, working through BuildFin.ai, the industry platform convened by the Monetary Authority of Singapore, and building on the regulator’s Safeguards for Agentic Finance at Runtime framework. The work covers agent onboarding and identification across networks while each network keeps its own verification and decisioning.
Neither Mastercard nor Visa supplied a quote for Ant’s announcement, and the collaboration came with no implementation timetable, no pilot volumes, no participating merchants and no technical specification. The three protocols it would bridge already exist separately. Ant said in April that it was among the first partners of Mastercard and Visa piloting card-based transaction capabilities for AI agents, and that it was working with Google on its agentic commerce protocols, so Ant has been present in the card-rail camp since before AMP existed.
Governance is where AMP now differs from its rivals. Google handed AP2 to the FIDO Alliance on April 28, 2026, releasing version 0.2 the same day, and Mastercard contributed Verifiable Intent to the same body. The FIDO payments working group that took on both contributions is chaired by Mastercard and Visa, the two networks now discussing KYA interoperability with Ant.
AMP’s source code, SDKs and documentation are published on GitHub, but the protocol remains under Ant International’s control, and the company has not said whether it intends to move it to a neutral standards body.
Who pays when the agent gets it wrong
AgentSafePay, the money-back mechanism Ant attaches to AMP transactions, is described in three different ways across the company’s own materials. The feature list in the September announcement presents it as a guarantee for merchants against agent-specific risks. The accompanying backgrounder says it covers all AMP-based transactions and frames the benefit around users avoiding additional transaction risk. April’s launch release described it as a mechanism for payment partners in cases of account takeover. Merchants, users and payment partners are three different parties bearing three different exposures, and the documentation does not settle which one the guarantee answers to.
That question eventually lands with regulators, and the region does not answer it consistently. Starryblu in Singapore operates under a regulator that has convened BuildFin.ai and published SAFR. Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines, home to four other Phase I wallets, have no published framework specific to payments initiated by an AI agent on a user’s behalf.
Ant and its KYA partners cite McKinsey research putting AI-orchestrated consumer commerce at between US$3 trillion and US$5 trillion globally by 2030. Whether the wallet side of that market materialises through AMP will be visible in a way Phase I is not, once a wallet switches the capability on and says so. Ant has not published what ends Phase I, or what it will ask of partners in the phase that follows.
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