Rain, the enterprise-grade infrastructure for stablecoin-powered payments, has announced the launch of the Agentic Payments Alliance (APA), a coalition of organizations working together to help guide the development of agentic commerce, in which software agents transact on a user's behalf. Founding members include Visa, Mastercard, Fiserv, Circle, Solana, and Remitly.

The founding group spans the payments stack — the Visa and Mastercard card networks, payments processor Fiserv, Circle as the issuer of the USDC stablecoin, the Solana blockchain, and digital remittance provider Remitly — bringing traditional card rails and blockchain-based rails into the same effort.

The initiative comes together while the category is still taking shape. McKinsey projects between $3 trillion and $5 trillion in global agentic commerce by 2030. Much of the infrastructure that activity will depend on — including how agents get authorized, how fraud gets caught, and how loyalty and rewards travel with an agent — is still being defined. The APA was formed to bring the people building that infrastructure into the same conversation, before those decisions get made in isolation. The major networks are already moving on their own: Visa launched its Intelligent Commerce framework in April 2025 to let AI agents transact on Visa credentials, and Mastercard introduced agentic tokens later in 2025 to let agents complete purchases using tokenized credentials.

Rain has spent the past year building toward this moment, including its Agent Control Layer and Scoped Cards, which give agents widely accepted payment credentials that are safe and limited. That work put Rain in a position to convene founding members from across the industry rather than build the category alone.

The Alliance itself is a working coalition, run collectively by its founding members rather than owned by any one company, and members will set its charter and mission together. Early work is expected to include shared research and frameworks, testing emerging standards for agent identity and authorization, and advocacy on the regulatory questions that agentic commerce raises. That advocacy lands against a regulatory backdrop taking shape unevenly: the US GENIUS Act, signed into law in July 2025, established a federal framework for payment stablecoins, but rules specific to AI-agent-initiated payments remain largely unwritten.

Founding members will also get early access to Rain's Agentic Startup Program, an accelerator supporting early-stage companies building for agentic commerce. The program's first cohort of five startups will present at a demo day open to Alliance members, giving the founding organizations a direct look at the applications and use cases shaping the category.

Executives from the founding companies pointed to the need for alignment as the category develops.

"The risk in a moment like this is not that the industry moves too slowly — it's that innovation outpaces alignment," said Sherri Haymond, executive vice president and global head of Digital Commercialization at Mastercard. "For decades, Mastercard has helped shape the standards that enable commerce at scale, and our participation in the Agentic Payments Alliance is a natural extension of that work for the agentic era."

"No single company should get to decide how agents transact on someone's behalf. That has to come from the platforms building the rails, the regulators setting the rules, and the innovators closest to how agents are actually being used today," said Farooq Malik, co-founder and CEO of Rain. "We initiated the Agentic Payments Alliance to put all of these parties in the same room, and to do it now, while the category is still taking shape."

Source: GlobalFinTechSeries