Ant Financial and HSBC have completed Agent "Micro Payment" verification, enabling banks to verify payments in real time.

On October 9, Ant Financial and HSBC completed the verification of AI-powered micro-payment technology in Hong Kong. The test demonstrated the process of AI-powered agents discovering and calling digital services, initiating payments, and then HSBC conducting real-time risk verification and settlement.

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

It is understood that this test uses HSBC's tokenized deposit service, Ant Financial's Anvita Flow network, and the Jovay testnet, and is still in the technical exploration stage.

Bian Zhuoqun, president of Ant Financial's blockchain business, said that this technical verification with HSBC demonstrates the potential uses of on-chain AI agents, and Ant Financial will continue to explore the application of autonomous agents in real-world business scenarios.

Lewis Sun, HSBC’s Global Head of Digital Currency, said that HSBC hopes to improve customer experience and reduce transaction friction through tokenized deposit services and new application partnerships, while focusing on customer needs, appropriate control, and responsible development.

There are already agreements and transactions for small-amount payments between machines.

As of April this year, the x402 protocol had accumulated adjusted transaction volume of approximately $15 million, involving approximately 109.6 million transactions; Stripe and Tempo's Machine Payments Protocol also completed settlements of approximately $25,000 within weeks of its launch.

These attempts reflect a new demand: software pays another software for a single API call or a small amount of computing power. The smaller the transaction amount and the higher the frequency, the more necessary it is to automate transaction fees, reconciliation, and risk assessment.

The specific incremental change verified by Ant Financial and HSBC this time is to enable intelligent agents to independently complete service calls and payments on behalf of users or enterprises, and to integrate the bank's real-time risk verification into the same process.

This differs from the aforementioned pure machine-to-machine protocols. HSBC explains that its tokenized deposit service can represent corporate deposits as on-chain digital certificates (1:1 corresponding 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 integrates service invocation and bank settlement into the same technical process. Whether it can be put into practical application depends on how digital service providers access, transaction costs, and intelligent agent authorization rules develop.

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