𝐊𝐧𝐨𝐰 𝐘𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐂𝐮𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐦𝐞𝐫. 𝐓𝐡𝐞𝐧 𝐋𝐢𝐦𝐢𝐭 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐀𝐠𝐞𝐧𝐭.

Know Your Customer was built for people.

Agentic commerce adds a second problem.

It is not enough to know who owns the money. You also need to know what their AI agent was allowed to do with it.

The industry has been working on identity.

In August 2025, Trulioo and Worldpay proposed a Digital Agent Passport: a way to prove that an agent is legitimate and acting with a customer’s authority.

More than a year later, the standards are still taking shape. And Worldpay says an important question remains unsettled: when an agent makes a mistake, who is responsible, the merchant, the bank or the agent platform?

China’s payment platforms are attacking the problem from another direction.

Verify the agent. Then limit the damage it can do.

JD.com published its agent payment protocol in June.

The simplest way to understand it is this:

The agent does not get unrestricted access to your money.

It gets a smaller account with rules.

How much can it spend?

Who can it pay?

What can it buy?

How long does the permission last?

Alipay is using a similar principle: give an agent authority to pay, but put boundaries around that authority.

This matters because identity and control solve different problems.

Identity tells you who sent the agent.

Limits determine how badly things can go wrong.

Neither JD nor Alipay has magically solved the legal question of who is liable when an agent makes the wrong purchase.

But they have made the potential loss smaller and the transaction easier to reconstruct.

That may prove more useful than waiting for perfect rules.

In February I argued that agentic AI needs a small blast radius and a stop-loss before anyone scales it.

I meant that as governance advice.

In June, it shipped as a payment rail.

So your next step is, ask your payment provider three questions:

What is the spending cap?

Who can the agent pay?

Who takes the loss when it buys the wrong thing?

Three answers or three silences.

Either way, you finally know where you stand.

#AgenticCommerce #RetailStrategy #DigitalIdentity #ChinaBusiness #ArtificialIntelligence

Contact

bruno.gentil@sherpaconsultingasia.com

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