Visa and Mastercard Join Rain’s Agentic Commerce Coalition

Stablecoin payments infrastructure company Rain has formed a group to promote agentic commerce development.

The Agentic Payments Alliance (APA) was announced Tuesday (Aug. 18), listing Visa, Mastercard, Fiserv, Circle, Solana and Remitly among its founding members.

“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,” Farooq Malik, co-founder and CEO of Rain, said in a news release.

“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.”

The release cites projections from McKinsey estimating between $3 trillion and $5 trillion in global agentic AI commerce by 2030.

What’s still being defined, Rain said, is the infrastructure that allows that activity: how artificial intelligence agents are authorized, how fraud is detected, and how loyalty and rewards will work. The company said it formed the APA to “bring the people building that infrastructure into the same conversation, before those decisions get made in isolation.”

Rain says it has spent the last year “building toward this moment,” with offerings like including its Agent Control Layer and Scoped Cards, which provide agents with widely accepted payment credentials “that are safe and limited.”

“That work put Rain in a position to convene founding members across the industry rather than build the category alone,” the release said. “The Alliance itself is a working coalition, run collectively by its founding members rather than owned by any one company. Members will set its charter and mission together.”

The group’s early work is expected to involve shared research and frameworks, experimenting with emerging standards for AI agent identity and authorization, and advocating on the regulatory questions raised by agentic commerce, Rain said.

PYMNTS wrote earlier this month about how Visa, Mastercard and fellow card giants American Express and Capital One are developing “the rails” for agentic commerce.

“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.”