Visa, Mastercard and Circle joined a new coalition on agent-driven payments

Rain Launches the Agentic Payments Alliance

Stablecoin payments firm @raincards has launched the Agentic Payments Alliance (APA), a new industry coalition aimed at shaping the rules of commerce driven by artificial intelligence agents. The APA brings together organisations working to guide the development of agentic commerce, with founding members including Visa, Mastercard, Fiserv, Circle, Solana and Remitly. Avalanche (@avax), Uniswap Labs (@UniswapLabsVC) and @chainalysis are also among the 26 founding members.

The coalition will operate as a working group run collectively by its founding members rather than owned by any single company. Members will set the charter and mission together, with early work expected to cover shared research and frameworks, testing emerging standards for agent identity and authorisation, and regulatory advocacy.

Why It Matters

The alliance arrives as the business case for agentic commerce accelerates. McKinsey projects between $3 trillion and $5 trillion in global agentic commerce by 2030, and much of the infrastructure that activity depends on, including how agents get authorised and how fraud gets caught, 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. Rain CEO Farooq Malik framed the rationale plainly: "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."

Rain itself is no newcomer to the space. In January 2026, the company announced a $250 million Series C at a $1.95 billion valuation to scale stablecoin-powered payments infrastructure for global enterprises. It has also launched an Agent Control Layer, making all of its payments infrastructure agent-compatible.

Founding members will receive early access to Rain's Agentic Startup Program, an accelerator supporting early-stage companies building for agentic commerce, with the first cohort of five startups set to present at a demo day open to Alliance members.

The APA is not alone in this effort. Google and Mastercard are among the big names backing a FIDO Alliance initiative to develop interoperable standards, with Google donating its open protocol and Mastercard providing its Verifiable Intent trust layer.

Sources:
Rain official press release via PR Newswire: Agentic Payments Alliance launch
Finextra: Visa and Mastercard back new Agentic Payments Alliance