Rain launches payments alliance for agentic commerce

Rain has launched the Agentic Payments Alliance, a coalition of more than 25 companies across payments, financial services and digital assets.

Founding members include Visa, Mastercard, Fiserv, Circle, Solana and Remitly, along with Avalanche, Chainalysis, Fireblocks, Shift4 and Uniswap Labs. The alliance will be run collectively by its founding members, which will set its charter and mission together rather than place it under one company's control.

The move reflects a broader push by payments and technology groups to shape the rules for so-called agentic commerce, in which software agents carry out transactions on behalf of users or businesses. Areas under discussion include how agents are authorised, how fraud is detected, and how loyalty and rewards are tied to an agent's activity.

McKinsey has projected that global agentic commerce could reach $3 trillion to $5 trillion by 2030. That prospect has pushed card networks, payment processors, blockchain groups and fintech providers to seek common standards before market practices become fragmented.

Shared framework

Early work by the alliance is expected to focus on shared research and frameworks, testing emerging standards for agent identity and authorisation, and advocating on regulatory questions tied to agent-led transactions. Its structure suggests an effort to build industry consensus early, rather than after systems are already embedded.

Over the past year, Rain has developed tools for this area, including an Agent Control Layer and Scoped Cards. The products are designed to give agents restricted, monitored payment credentials as companies explore ways to let automated systems make purchases without granting unrestricted access to funds.

Rain operates in stablecoin payments and issues cards through both the Visa and Mastercard networks. Its cards can be used at more than 175 million merchant locations across more than 200 countries and territories.

Another feature of the initiative is early access for founding members to Rain's Agentic Startup Program, an accelerator for early-stage companies building products for agentic commerce. The first cohort consists of five startups, which will be introduced to alliance members as examples of emerging applications and use cases in the category.

Industry backing

Mastercard described its involvement as part of a broader effort to shape standards for a new area of commerce.

"The risk in a moment like this is not that the industry moves too slowly - it's that innovation outpaces alignment. 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," said Sherri Haymond, Executive Vice President and Global Head of Digital Commercialisation at Mastercard.

Rain's leadership said the alliance was intended to prevent any one company from dictating how agents transact on someone's behalf.

"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. 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," said Farooq Malik, Co-Founder and CEO of Rain.

The founding roster shows how broad the issue has become. It spans card networks such as Visa and Mastercard; payments and processing groups including Fiserv, Evertec and Shift4; remittance provider Remitly; digital asset companies including Circle, Solana, Avalanche, Monad and Fireblocks; and infrastructure specialists such as Lithic, Basis Theory and Turnkey.

That mix reflects the range of technical and policy questions raised by agent-driven commerce. Payment companies must consider liability and merchant acceptance, financial firms face compliance and fraud concerns, and digital asset groups are trying to define how programmable money and wallets fit into automated purchasing systems.

For Rain, the alliance also places the company at the centre of an emerging debate over how artificial intelligence systems interact with payment rails. Rather than promoting a single technical model, it is positioning the coalition as a forum where networks, platforms and developers can decide together how those systems should be governed.

The membership list includes Avalanche, Basis Theory, Chainalysis, Circle, Coinflow, Crossmint, delta Network, Episode Six, Evertec, Fireblocks, Fiserv, Kala, Lithic, Mastercard, Monad, PayOS, Rain, Remitly, Rialo by Subzero Labs, Sardine, Shift4, Solana, Turnkey, Uniswap Labs, Visa and Yuno.