Commerce at Machine Speed Part III: Know Your Agent - Identity, Mandate, and Accountability in Autonomous Commerce
Every commercial transaction rests on a question that current verification infrastructure was built to answer: who is this counterparty, and what are they authorised to do? When the transacting party is an autonomous agent, neither part of that question has a workable answer. An agent carries a wallet address, a set of programmed parameters, and a principal somewhere upstream who authorised it to act — but no legal personhood, no transaction history of its own, and no capacity to bear liability. Know Your Agent (KYA) applies the logic of Know Your Customer (KYC) to the agent itself: what it is, what it is authorised to do, on whose behalf it acts, and what record exists of its actions.
Commerce at Machine Speed: Know Your Agent is authored by Nicole Sandler, Chief Ecosystem Officer at Ubyx, with key contributions from Absa, Amazon, Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP), the Credentials and Authorization Registry of Agentic Commerce (CLARC), the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), the Global Financial Innovation Network (GFIN), the Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation (GLEIF), Kulipa, Matter Labs, NatWest, NVNM Chain, Ripple, StraitsX, TRM Labs, Utila, Yellow Card, and Yuno.
The paper addresses the identity, mandate, and accountability standards that autonomous agents require in commercial transactions, building on the settlement and governance infrastructure the earlier papers established. It is the third and final paper in the series.
