Patent-pending platform protects merchants from third-party fraud by rogue AI agents and first-party disputes by the customers behind them
WILMINGTON, Del., Sept. 24, 2026 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- Kyance today launched a patent-pending trust platform for general availability that lets merchants verify and score the AI agents shopping on consumers' behalf, confirm the person behind each agent and keep the evidence to win a dispute if that person later denies the purchase.
Merchants are preparing for agent-led checkout while fighting a rise in disputes from their own customers. According to the 2026 Global eCommerce Payments & Fraud Report from the Merchant Risk Council and Visa Acceptance Solutions, 63% of merchants are exploring or implementing solutions to process agentic AI payments, and 64% report an increase in first-party misuse, also called friendly fraud. Fraud tools built to judge human shoppers cannot tell a trustworthy agent from a spoofed one, and they leave merchants with no record of what an agent was authorized to do.
Kyance covers both sides of that risk. For third-party fraud, a spoofed or malicious agent, or a stolen identity behind a real one, is flagged at checkout so the merchant can step up or decline before the order ships. For first-party fraud, when a customer claims their agent's purchase was unauthorized, the merchant holds signed proof of who authorized it. The platform delivers:
- Know Your Agent (KYA): Real-time scoring of the agent's identity, provenance and behavior.
- Know Your Agent's Customer (KYAC): Binds each agent to a verified person without exposing that person's data to the merchant.
- Cross-merchant reputation: An agent flagged at one participating merchant is flagged for the next, so fraud does not travel undetected.
- Trust Receipt: A cryptographically signed record issued at checkout and valid through the dispute window, giving merchants dispute-grade evidence.
Kyance is network-neutral and designed to work alongside Visa Trusted Agent Protocol, Mastercard Verifiable Intent, Model Context Protocol, AP2, UCP and other emerging agentic commerce standards.
Kyance also named co-founder Tim Brown chief executive officer. Brown brings 30 years in digital identity and biometrics, with leadership roles in product, strategy, technology and architecture at IBM, SAFlink/NRI, IDEMIA, Prove and a Big Four professional services firm. He holds multiple patents in identity and biometrics and is a former board member of the FIDO Alliance, the industry body behind passkeys and phishing-resistant authentication standards. That work on how people prove who they are online now extends to the software agents acting on their behalf. Kyance's founding team pairs Brown's identity background with three decades in payments and fraud prevention.
"Network protocols tell a merchant that an agent is registered and that a consumer expressed intent. They don't tell the merchant whether to trust either one," Brown said. "The protocols are the signature. Kyance is the score. We give merchants the confidence to say yes to agent commerce, and the evidence to win when a customer says it wasn't them."
Kyance is live and accepting design partners. Merchants, payment providers and dispute platforms can apply at kyance.com.
About Kyance: The Trust Decision for Every Agentic Transaction ™. Kyance is the cross-merchant trust network for agentic commerce. Its Know Your Agent (KYA) and Know Your Agent's Customer (KYAC) services, built on patent-pending technology, score AI agents and the people behind them in real time, bind each agent to a verified identity without exposing personal data, and share reputation signals across participating merchants. A neutral third party independent of any payment network, Kyance protects merchants against both first-party and third-party fraud pre-transaction, post-transaction and in the chargeback process. Kyance is built by a team with 60 combined years in identity, biometrics, payments and fraud prevention. Learn more at kyance.com.
Media Contact
Tim Brown, Kyance, 1 4806484040, [email protected], www.kyance.com
SOURCE Kyance
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