Rain, Visa, Mastercard and others launch Agentic Payments Alliance to set AI commerce standards

Rain, Mastercard, Visa and a long list of payments and crypto infrastructure firms have formed the Agentic Payments Alliance (APA), a working coalition meant to standardize the messy bits of agentic commerce before everyone builds incompatible systems and calls it progress. For PSPs, issuers and partners, the point is straightforward: who gets authorized, how fraud is detected, and how loyalty, rewards and other controls work in AI-driven payments.

1. The APA starts with about two dozen members, including Mastercard, Visa, Fiserv, Circle, Remitly, Avalanche, Basis Theory, Chainalysis, Coinflow, Crossmint, delta Network, Episode Six, Evertec, Fireblocks, Kala, Lithic, Monad, PayOS, Rain, Rialo by Subzero Labs, Sardine, Shift4, Solana, Turnkey, Uniswap Labs and Yuno.
2. The group is being run collectively by its founding members rather than owned by one company. Its first workstreams include shared research and tests for AI agent identification and authorization, plus joint advocacy on regulatory issues tied to agentic commerce.
3. Mastercard’s Sherri Haymond, executive vice president and global head of digital commercialization, framed the problem bluntly: “The risk in a moment like this is not that the industry moves too slowly — it's that innovation outpaces alignment.” That is the entire issue in one sentence: the protocols are being built while the market is still arguing over what the rules should be.
4. Rain, which lets businesses launch payment cards funded by users’ stablecoin deposits, said the alliance is meant to put the relevant parties “in the same room” instead of leaving each company to build siloed systems. Sophia Goldberg, Rain’s head of payments and a facilitator for the ACA, said agentic commerce is “very early” and that the same questions about protocols and risks keep coming up in separate conversations with clients and partners.
5. Rain will also contribute its Agentic Startup Program, an accelerator for early-stable agentic commerce companies, and that program will be available to APA members. The alliance says it will recruit more members in the months ahead.

The practical implication for high-risk merchants and their PSPs is that agentic commerce is not yet a clean, settled product category. The infrastructure around authorization, fraud, loyalty and rewards is still being defined, which means the companies in this alliance are trying to shape the default rules before the market hardens around something else.