Ant Group Digital Technology and HSBC complete Agent "micro-payment" verification, enabling banks to access real-time authentication in the payment process

On October 9, Ant Digital Technologies and HSBC completed a technical validation of AI agent micropayment technology in Hong Kong. The test demonstrated a process in which an AI agent discovers and accesses digital services, initiates payment, and then undergoes real-time risk verification and settlement by HSBC.

Micropayments usually refer to small transactions of less than $2, but the specific payment amount for this test was not disclosed.

It is reported that the test used HSBC's tokenized deposit service, Ant Digital Technologies' Anvita Flow network, and the Jovay testnet, and remains at the technology exploration stage.

Bian Zhuoqun, President of Blockchain Business at Ant Digital Technologies, stated that this technical validation with HSBC showcased the potential uses of on-chain AI agents, and Ant Digital Technologies will continue to explore the application of autonomous agents in real-world business scenarios.

Lewis Sun, Global Head of Digital Currencies at HSBC, said that HSBC aims to enhance customer experience and reduce transaction friction through its tokenized deposit service and new application partnerships, while focusing on customer needs, appropriate controls, and responsible development.

There are already protocols and transaction activities for small-value payments between machines.

As of April this year, the x402 protocol had an adjusted cumulative transaction amount of about $15 million, involving approximately 109.6 million transactions. In addition, the Machine Payments Protocol launched by Stripe and Tempo completed settlements of about $25,000 a few weeks after going live.

These efforts reflect a new type of demand: software making payments to other software for a single API call or a small amount of computing power. The smaller and more frequent the transaction, the more automation is required for handling fees, reconciliation, and risk assessment.

The specific incremental advancement in this validation by Ant Digital Technologies and HSBC is allowing agents to autonomously complete service calls and payments on behalf of users or enterprises, and integrating the bank's real-time risk verification into the same process.

This differs from the aforementioned protocol for pure machine-to-machine transactions. According to HSBC, its tokenized deposit service can represent corporate deposits as on-chain digital certificates (at a 1:1 ratio to deposit accounts), supporting 24/7 near real-time transfers within the HSBC network. This service has already been launched in Hong Kong, Singapore, Luxembourg, the United Kingdom, the United States, and the United Arab Emirates.

This test integrated service invocation and bank settlement into the same technical process. Whether it will lead to practical applications will depend on how digital service providers are integrated, transaction costs, and the development of agent authorization rules.