Rain, a stablecoin payments infrastructure company, announced the Agentic Payments Alliance (APA) on August 18, a working coalition meant to define how autonomous agents get authorized to pay, how fraud gets caught when they do, and how identity travels with an agent across platforms. Founding members include Visa, Mastercard, Circle, Fiserv, Solana, Remitly, Fireblocks, Chainalysis, and Uniswap Labs, with the release counting more than 25 organizations in total.
Highlights#
The coalition frames its timing around scale. The release cites a McKinsey projection that agentic commerce will reach $3 trillion to $5 trillion globally by 2030, and argues that authorization, fraud, and loyalty mechanics for agents are still unsettled. The APA wants those decisions made in shared rooms rather than in isolation.
Rain's convening position rests on its Agent Control Layer and Scoped Cards, products that issue payment credentials to agents with narrow permissions. The Alliance itself will be governed collectively by founding members, who will set its charter together.
Early work is expected to include shared research, frameworks for emerging agent identity and authorization standards, and regulatory advocacy. Founding members also get early access to Rain's Agentic Startup Program, an accelerator whose first five-company cohort presents to Alliance members at a demo day.
Mastercard's Sherri Haymond, global head of Digital Commercialization, said the risk in this moment is "not that the industry moves too slowly — it's that innovation outpaces alignment." Rain CEO Farooq Malik said no single company should decide how agents transact on someone's behalf.
Why it matters#
Every hard problem the APA names — agent identity, authorization scope, fraud on machine-speed transactions — is a trust problem, not a payments problem. Card networks standardizing agent credentials is good news for adoption; it also concentrates the question of who vouches for an agent when a transaction goes wrong, which is where reputation and escrow layers sit.