Rain, the global payments platform for both human and agentic transactions, has introduced Rain Agent Vaults, embedded payment infrastructure that lets an AI agent spend, receive, and send money from a balance funded by its owner, within rules the owner sets.

Each vault can be funded by bank transfer, card, or stablecoins, and an agent can only pay or send what is in it. Rain issues a scoped card for each purchase, accepted at 175 million merchant locations across 200 countries and territories, and agents can send funds to local bank accounts in more than 80 countries.

“People want to use AI agents that can move money as freely as humans do. An agent that can search for a new pair of shoes but cannot pay for them is not doing its job,” said Farooq Malik, CEO and co-founder of Rain. “With Rain Agent Vaults, developers can build embedded payment solutions directly into their agents, giving businesses and consumers the ability to load a balance, set rules, and allow agents to pay in a trusted fashion. All of this is available in a single integration while the user, the rules, and the balance sit with the partner that built the agent.”

Why agents need a new way to pay

AI agents today can search, compare, and shop, but paying remains a significant challenge. The options available to companies building agentic products have been a raw card number, which is a standing permission with no limit on what it can be used for, or a third-party wallet, which puts another company’s login inside their app, that company’s name on their users’ statements, and one limit on the whole balance, set in that company’s app. Companies enabling agentic experiences want their users to fund a balance once and never be asked again, and they want the relationship, the brand, and the payment to stay in their own product.

Key capabilities

Rain Agent Vaults put a funded balance, spend controls, and Rain-issued scoped cards inside an AI agent, so the agent can get paid, spend, and pay out.

Users can add funds quickly through several channels: bank account — including ACH, Fedwire, and FedNow in the United States, SEPA in Europe, and the UK's Faster Payments Service (FPS), among others — cards, or stablecoins, cryptocurrencies designed to track the value of fiat currencies such as the US dollar. Money must be in the vault before any card is issued against it. At checkout there is one card transaction: a scoped card paying the merchant from the vault.

Agents are expected to pay people and other agents, make purchases, initiate micropayments for API calls, and more. Agent Vaults let agents move money as easily as humans do, while giving them the same discretion, logic, and rules.

Trust sits at the foundation of the product. As a Visa and Mastercard Principal Member — a direct membership in both networks — Rain enables both Visa Intelligent Commerce and Mastercard Agent Pay, the card networks' agent commerce programs, which signal the user’s intent and consent.

Developers embed the payment experience directly into their agents, so Rain’s partners keep the relationship with the user while payments work as expected.

How Rain Agent Vaults work

Rain Agent Vaults are built for business and consumer use cases. Rain partners can embed agent vaults within their own apps and platforms, maintaining their own branding and customer relationship.

A business can fund an agent vault from its business bank account, enabling payouts to more than 80 countries around the world once specific rules and circumstances are met. Alternatively, a consumer can load funds directly into the agent vault from their card, set the rules, and a Rain-issued scoped card is created within those rules for each purchase. The card information is then retired, preventing overspending.

Rain illustrated the model with an example: a bakery owner moves $5,000 into her bakery’s vault, sets the rules so the agent may only pay suppliers and must ask her above $1,500, and leaves for the weekend. On Saturday, the agent sees a run of orders for the week ahead and gets a card for $640 to buy 20 bags of flour from the mill. On Monday, a catering order comes in and the agent gets a second card for $800 for 25 more bags. Both are suppliers, both are under her limit, and both go through. When the agent finds a mixer for $2,400, equipment is outside the rules, so the purchase is held for her to approve even though the money is in the vault.

Built on Rain's existing agent and card platform

Rain Agent Vaults build on the company’s Agent Control Layer and scoped cards, which Rain partners already use to give agents real-world spending power. Rain started with stablecoin-powered cards and has grown into a full-stack platform where partners issue cards, run wallets, move money, and settle across card and blockchain networks through one integration. Every product a partner adds works with the ones they already run, so a balance that arrives by bank transfer can be spent by an agent on a card and paid out to a bank account in another country without a second vendor.

Rain is a founding member of the Agentic Payments Alliance. The company is enabling its programs for Visa Intelligent Commerce and Mastercard Agent Pay, so a scoped card issued from a vault will carry the networks’ agent credential, which signals the user’s consent to the merchant and the issuer, alongside the rules the partner set.

Additional information about Rain Agent Vaults is available on Rain's official website.