Visa, Mastercard join alliance to set AI payment rules

More than 25 organizations across payments, crypto, and fintech have joined a newly formed coalition aimed at shaping how AI agents transact on behalf of humans and machines, as the industry races to define standards before trillions of dollars in autonomous commerce come online.

A Coalition Takes Shape

Rain, an enterprise stablecoin payments platform, on Tuesday announced the launch of the Agentic Payments Alliance (APA), a working coalition whose founding members include Visa ↗ 0.01%, Mastercard ↗ 0.08%, Fiserv ↘ 1.00%, Circle, Solana ↘ 0.12%, and Remitly ↗ 1.83%. The group also counts Shift4 ↗ 2.08%, Uniswap Labs, Fireblocks, Chainalysis, Avalanche ↗ 2.52%, and Coinbase ↘ 1.57%-backed Coinflow among its members.rain

The alliance is structured as a collectively governed body rather than one owned by a single company. Early work will focus on shared research, testing standards for agent identity and authorization, and advocacy on regulatory questions raised by agentic commerce.rain

The Stakes

McKinsey projects between $3 trillion and $5 trillion in global agentic commerce by 2030, according to Rain's announcement. Much of the infrastructure that activity will depend on — how agents get authorized, how fraud gets detected, and how loyalty programs travel with an agent — remains undefined.rain

"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.rain

The formation comes as both Mastercard and Visa have independently built agentic payment products. Mastercard launched Agent Pay for Machines (AP4M) earlier this year, a protocol for high-velocity, sub-dollar machine-to-machine payments with partners including Cloudflare ↘ 0.82% and Coinbase. CEO Michael Miebach has described machines paying machines for compute power, APIs, and data as "a payment stream that was never on any network".247wallst

Building Before the Rules Are Set

Rain CEO Farooq Malik framed the initiative as a preemptive move. "No single company should get to decide how agents transact on someone's behalf," he said. "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".rain

Alliance members will also get early access to Rain's Agentic Startup Program, an accelerator whose first cohort of five startups will present at a demo day open to the coalition.rain