NEW YORK — Stablecoin payments infrastructure company Rain has formed an industry alliance with Visa, Mastercard, Fiserv and other financial technology companies aimed at helping establish standards for payments made by artificial intelligence agents.
Rain has announced the formation of the Agentic Payments Alliance, or APA, a coalition focused on developing infrastructure, standards and regulatory approaches for so-called agentic commerce, in which AI agents can initiate transactions on behalf of consumers or businesses.
Founding members include Visa, Mastercard, Fiserv, Circle, Solana and Remitly, according to Rain.
The alliance comes as financial services and technology companies prepare for potentially rapid growth in commerce conducted by AI agents. Rain cited McKinsey projections estimating global agentic AI commerce could reach between $3 trillion and $5 trillion by 2030.
‘No One Company Should Decide’
“No single company should get to decide how agents transact on someone’s behalf,” Farooq Malik, co-founder and CEO of Rain, said in a statement. “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.”
Malik said Rain created the alliance to bring those groups together while the technology and standards governing agentic payments are still developing.
“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,” he said.
The Issues Being Faced
Among the issues facing the industry are how AI agents will be identified and authorized to make payments, how financial institutions and payment providers will detect fraud involving agents and how existing loyalty and rewards programs will function when an AI agent conducts a transaction.
Rain said the alliance is intended to bring companies developing that infrastructure together before individual firms establish potentially incompatible approaches.
The APA said it will operate as a working coalition run collectively by its founding members rather than being controlled by Rain or another single company, according to the announcement. Members will jointly establish the group’s charter and mission.
The Initial Work
Initial work is expected to include shared research and frameworks, experiments involving emerging standards for AI agent identity and authorization, and advocacy surrounding regulatory issues raised by agentic commerce.
Rain said its own work during the past year has included development of an Agent Control Layer and Scoped Cards. The company said the technology is designed to give AI agents payment credentials that can be widely accepted while limiting how and where the credentials can be used.
Rain said that work positioned the company to convene other payments and technology companies rather than attempt to establish the emerging agentic payments category on its own.
Visa has separately identified AI-driven commerce as a potentially significant development for the payments industry.
‘When, Not If’
“Agentic commerce is a when, not an if,” Visa CEO Ryan McInerney said during an earnings call. “We’re building the products, the services, the protocols, ensuring that the ecosystem has what it takes, and this will happen, and it will be a positive tailwind for Visa.”
The formation of the alliance reflects a broader effort within the payments industry to determine how existing financial networks will accommodate AI systems capable of independently researching products, making purchasing decisions and initiating transactions while operating under parameters established by consumers or businesses.
