Visa, Mastercard, Fiserv, and more than 20 other firms are joining Rain’s new coalition to help define how AI agents pay on people’s behalf.
Rain, an infrastructure provider for stablecoin-powered payments, today announced the launch of the Agentic Payments Alliance (APA), a coalition of organizations working to help guide the development of agentic commerce. Founding members include Visa, Mastercard, Fiserv, Circle, Solana and Remitly.
McKinsey has projected that global agentic commerce will be between $3 trillion and $5 trillion by 2030. Much of the infrastructure that activity will depend on—how agents get authorized, how fraud gets caught, how loyalty and rewards travel with an agent—is still being defined, and the APA was formed to bring the organizations building that infrastructure into a shared conversation before those decisions are made in isolation.
Rain says the coalition builds on the past year of its own work in the space, including its Agent Control Layer and Scoped Cards, which give AI agents widely accepted but scope-limited payment credentials. That work, the company says, puts it in a position to convene founding members across the industry rather than build the category alone.
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The Alliance is structured as a working coalition, run collectively by its founding members rather than owned by any single company; members will jointly set its charter and mission. Early work is expected to include shared research and frameworks, testing emerging standards for agent identity and authorization, and advocacy on regulatory questions raised by agentic commerce.
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.
“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.”
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“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.”
