Know Your AgentKYA

The practice of verifying an AI agent, and the person or organization behind it, before letting it take action, the AI-agent equivalent of Know Your Customer.

A bank might check who registered an agent and what it is allowed to do before accepting a payment request from it.

An emerging framework, backed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in a 2026 note on agentic AI in payments (Note 2026/004), for moving regulators from Know Your Customer to Know Your Agent, with mandated verifiable identities for financial bots linked to legal entities. The framework verifies the agent and the authority it acts under before it takes action.

Incode's analysis breaks verification into three parts:

• The agent's registered identity and scope, which records who the agent is and what it may do.
• The mandate, which is the authorization for the specific action.
• The human behind the mandate, whose authority the agent invokes.

The IMF note describes a three-layer model for agent payments, covering intent, control and authorization, and settlement. Industry groups are moving too: Visa, Mastercard, and Ant International have announced a Know-Your-Agent framework that lets card networks, wallets, and marketplaces recognize trusted agents.

Know Your Agent sits next to terms that are easy to mix up:

• Know your customer (KYC) verifies a human customer, while Know Your Agent extends the idea to software acting for that customer.
• Agentic identity is the technical layer that links an agent to its owner and enforces its scope.
• Agent mandate is the permission that defines what the agent may do.

For more, see What the IMF Got Right About Know Your Agent.