Rain, Visa, and Mastercard Form Alliance to Standardize AI-Driven Payments

Rain, Visa and Mastercard have joined around two dozen other companies to launch the Agentic Payments Alliance, a group focused on developing common standards for AI-driven payments. According to EUROPE SAYS, the alliance aims to address areas such as payment authorization, fraud prevention and identity verification, where there is still no widely shared framework across different payment networks and digital systems.

Jaan Girdeinis, a sports analyst who has followed Lithuania’s online casino market for more than a decade, sees this as an area that could eventually affect regulated gambling platforms as well. Licensed operators already handle large numbers of deposits and withdrawals, so reliable transactions and effective fraud controls are part of their everyday operations. casinoguru.lt, which provides information on Lithuanian casino operators and their payment options, is one example of how closely payment methods are tied to the online gambling experience.

For Girdeinis, the alliance is therefore not simply a development within the wider payments industry. As AI becomes more involved in financial transactions, companies across different sectors will have to work out how new systems can operate safely alongside existing payment infrastructure.

“The risk in a moment like this is not that the industry moves too slowly — it’s that innovation outpaces alignment.”

The comment came from Sherri Haymond, Mastercard’s executive vice president and global head of digital commercialization, in the announcement about the alliance. Girdeinis sees the point as particularly relevant for industries where payments happen frequently and where reliability and security are already essential parts of the customer experience.

The Alliance’s Founding Members and Its EMV Ambition

The APA counts approximately two dozen founding members at launch and is actively recruiting more in the months ahead. The full roster includes Avalanche, Basis Theory, Chainalysis, Circle, Coinflow, Crossmint, delta Network, Episode Six, Evertec, Fireblocks, Fiserv, Kala, Lithic, Mastercard, Monad, PayOS, Rain, Remitly, Rialo by Subzero Labs, Sardine, Shift4, Solana, Turnkey, Uniswap Labs, Visa, and Yuno.

No single company owns the coalition. It operates collectively, with decisions distributed among its founding members rather than directed from any one organization’s headquarters.

The structural model the APA invokes is EMV, the global standard that resolved the fragmentation between chip-card systems across different networks and regions. Just as EMV gave terminals and cards a shared language, the APA aims to give AI agents and the payment systems they interact with a common set of rules for identification, authorization, and fraud detection. Sophia Goldberg, head of payments at Rain, framed the ambition plainly when speaking to American Banker: “We’re trying to be the unifying force in some of these conversations.”

What the Coalition Is Actually Building

Much of the infrastructure for agentic commerce remains unfinished. How AI agents get authorized to spend, how fraud gets caught when the actor is software rather than a person, and how loyalty and rewards programs account for machine-initiated purchases are all still being defined. The APA’s first concrete initiatives address this gap through shared research, coordinated testing of AI agent identification and authorization methods, and joint advocacy on regulatory questions tied to agentic commerce.

Rain brings specific technical capabilities to that work. Its technology allows businesses to launch payment cards funded directly by users’ stablecoin deposits, a model that bridges blockchain-native assets and traditional card rails. Rain will also contribute its Agentic Startup Program, an accelerator for early-stage agentic commerce companies, making it available to APA members.

Goldberg acknowledged the timing question openly. “Agentic commerce is very early,” she told American Banker. “Everyone has the question of when the big volume will hit.”

Fraud Risk and Bot Detection Are Forcing the Urgency

The coalition’s urgency is not purely commercial. Research from Darwinium, an AI fraud company, found that 48 percent of bank respondents allow AI-initiated transactions by default and rely on after-the-fact monitoring to catch problems, while 31 percent take the opposite approach and block such transactions unless explicitly permitted. Neither posture reflects a coherent standard.

Michael Rodriguez, Darwinium’s chief growth officer, told American Banker in March that banks are not doing a good job of distinguishing between legitimate automated activity and malicious bots. The distinction matters enormously. A payment agent completing a purchase on behalf of a consumer and a bot probing for account vulnerabilities can look identical to a system that has no framework for telling them apart.

Visa moved to sharpen its capabilities in this area by acquiring Biocatch, a behavioral biometrics firm. The acquisition was driven specifically by the challenge of monitoring autonomous technology and separating AI agents from bad actors, a problem that becomes more acute as agentic commerce scales.

The Case for a Broad Coalition Over Siloed Standards

McKinsey projects global agentic commerce will reach between three trillion and five trillion dollars by 2030. At that scale, fragmented protocols become costly, not just inconvenient.

Zil Bareisis, a director at Celent, offered the structural argument for why an alliance model gives the APA better odds than proprietary approaches.

“It’s natural for the forerunners to launch their own protocols and standards, and we’ve seen plenty of examples of that already around agentic commerce. But at some point, those standards must converge to achieve scale. Different approaches used by different providers is not viable in the long run, as it lacks interoperability and consistency, driving up costs for the industry and undermining confidence and trust.”

His second observation went further. Traditional payment networks will matter in agentic commerce, Bareisis argued, but they will not be the only players that matter. A coalition spanning card networks, blockchain infrastructure, payment processors, compliance technology, and remittance companies, he said, “stands a better chance of becoming adopted than anything done by any of those companies individually.” The breadth of the APA’s founding roster, in that reading, is not incidental. It is the mechanism.