Three of the largest payment networks are working from the same accountability playbook. Visa, Mastercard, and Ant International are collaborating on a Know Your Agent (KYA) approach built on the Safeguards for Agentic Finance at Runtime (SAFR) framework, convened through the Monetary Authority of Singapore's BuildFin.ai platform, to advance common approaches for AI agent verification, accountability, and risk management across payment ecosystems. The mechanics matter more than the press-release language suggests. This isn't a one-time onboarding check. The three firms will share standard certification requirements, and deploy continuous monitoring using identity and transaction-related signals to keep certification current, rather than treating a single credential check as sufficient for an agent's entire operating life. The collaboration is explicitly framed around traceability: linking each agent across networks to a validated operator, cardholder, or organization with clear attribution. That's a meaningful design choice given how payment fraud typically breaks trust models — not at the moment of onboarding, but months later, after an agent's permissions or ownership have quietly changed. A framework that only checks credentials once at signup can't catch an agent whose operator relationship has since been revoked, or one that's been repurposed for a different task than it was certified for. Continuous monitoring against transaction signals is an attempt to close that gap by treating certification as a state that can lapse, not a badge that's permanent once issued. Visa's framing leans on the trust-must-scale-with-volume logic: as AI agents take on a bigger share of how people discover and buy, the payment networks are betting that shared, cross-company certification is more durable than each platform building its own bespoke agent-vetting stack. That's a bet against fragmentation — three competitors agreeing to a common floor of proof rather than three incompatible ones. What's still unclear from the announcement is enforcement: what happens when continuous monitoring flags an agent mid-transaction, who has authority to suspend certification, and whether merchants outside the three-party consortium get any visibility into an agent's KYA status before accepting its transaction. Those operational details will determine whether this becomes real infrastructure or a joint statement of intent. The framework name suggests the runtime-safeguard ambition is there; the public record doesn't yet show enforcement mechanics. This sits closer to attestation than identity in the strict sense — the emphasis is on ongoing, verifiable proof of an agent's standing at the moment of a transaction, not on issuing the initial credential. It's a signal that payment infrastructure providers see agent accountability as a continuous audit problem, not a registration-time formality.