Who Controls AI Agents' Access to Payment Rails?

Singapore has been building the architecture for agentic finance governance in public. The question was who would wire it to the payment layer.

On March 26, MetaComp — a Singapore-based fintech licensed by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) as a Major Payment Institution — gave part of an answer. The company announced three products simultaneously: a production compliance engine called VisionX Engine, a downloadable Skill for Claude called AgentX, and a governance framework called Know Your Agent (KYA) aligned with the Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) Model AI Governance Framework for Agentic AI PR Newswire launched at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Jan. 22, 2026.

The sequence is not accidental. IMDA set principles for agentic AI governance at Davos. MAS published its AI Risk Management Operationalisation Handbook on March 20 — six days before MetaComp's announcement — a collaborative industry document addressing AI risk in financial services. Now MetaComp is attempting to wire those principles into the stablecoin payment infrastructure it already operates: $10 billion in processed volume across 13 stablecoins in 2025, at a monthly run rate exceeding $1 billion, with full-year net profitability — real numbers for a real operation.

The core technical problem VisionX Engine addresses is documented. A MetaComp research paper published in July 2025 on the MCE Singapore research portal analyzed 7,000 real-world USDT and USDC transactions on Ethereum and Tron using blockchain analytics tools from Beosin, Chainalysis, Elliptic, and Merkle Science MCE Research Paper. The finding: relying on a single Know Your Transaction (KYT) tool missed up to 24.55 percent of high-risk transactions — roughly one in four. The false clean rate, as the industry calls it, meant compliant-looking transactions were passing scrutiny that should have flagged them.

VisionX Engine — MetaComp calls the approach Web2.5, a term that describes the integration layer rather than a blockchain protocol — deploys four or more blockchain analytics vendors in parallel rather than sequentially. The company's own claims put the false clean rate for high-risk transactions at 0.24 percent. The architecture is three-layer: identity (unified Web2 KYC records and Web3 wallet data into dynamic risk profiles), behaviour (transaction pattern analysis over time to surface anomalies), and network (mapping indirect counterparty relationships that single-tool screening misses). The system is available from March 2026 and is described as patent-pending.

The governance layer is where MetaComp is making the more structural bet. KYA — Know Your Agent — attempts to define what Know Your Customer compliance looks like when the customer is an AI agent acting autonomously PYMNTS. The framework is organized around four pillars drawn from the IMDA model: Assess and Bound Risks, Human Accountability, Technical Controls, and Adaptive Controls. It covers agent-to-agent communications, onboarding standards, and supervisory oversight for agent-related financial transactions. In practice, this means: when an AI agent initiates a stablecoin transfer, what entity authorized it, what parameters were set, and who can answer if something goes wrong.

The goal of KYA is to define agent-to-agent communications, onboarding standards and supervisory oversight for agent-related financial transactions, MetaComp said. The launch event drew representatives from MAS, the Singapore Police Force Commercial Affairs Department, the Singapore Fintech Association, and LexisNexis Risk Solutions — a cross-section of the regulatory and compliance infrastructure Singapore has been assembling around digital assets.

The Travel Rule context matters here. The FATF Travel Rule — requiring information sharing on virtual asset transfers — has been the compliance industry's persistent challenge. According to FATF surveys cited in MetaComp's announcement, 54 percent of jurisdictions had taken no steps toward Travel Rule compliance as recently as 2023. That reversed sharply: 70 percent had passed legislation in 2024, rising to 73 percent in 2025. The Travel Rule is fundamentally an agent-to-agent information transfer problem — and as stablecoin volumes grow, the agentic dimension of compliance is becoming less theoretical.

MetaComp also announced AgentX, which it describes as the first downloadable financial Skill for Claude. The Skill packages VisionX as an agentic KYT tool — meaning a Claude instance can, in theory, query VisionX's compliance data directly as part of a transaction workflow. The Skill is listed as available from metacomp.ai on the announcement date. One caveat: this publication was unable to independently verify the Skill file's presence on metacomp.ai as of publication, due to site access limitations. The claim deserves scrutiny before it is treated as shipped infrastructure rather than announced product.

The funding picture rounds out the picture. MetaComp closed $35 million across two Pre-A rounds in three months: a $22 million round in December 2025 led by Eastern Bell Capital, Noah, Sky9 Capital, Freshwave Fund, and Beingboom Capital, followed by a Pre-A+ round in March 2026 backed by Alibaba and Spark Ventures TechNode Global. Tin Pei Ling, MetaComp's Co-President and a Singapore Member of Parliament, framed the KYA framework as Singapore moving from principles to practice. Summer Yu, Group Chief Compliance Officer at affiliate Alpha Ladder Finance — which holds MAS Capital Markets Services and Recognised Market Operator licences and manages wealth AUM exceeding $500 million — noted that the affiliate's licensed infrastructure provides the regulatory on-ramp for VisionX deployment Alpha Ladder.

What to watch: whether MAS's stablecoin framework, finalised in August 2023 with implementation slated for mid-2026, incorporates KYA-style accountability requirements for AI agent-initiated transactions. Singapore's coordinated regulatory sequence is moving faster than most jurisdictions. If it works, the dependency graph runs IMDA principles to MAS guidance to licensed intermediaries to compliance engines like VisionX to agent frameworks. That is a complete stack. Whether anyone outside Singapore adopts it is the next question.