Rain, Visa, Mastercard form agentic AI standards group

• Key insights: Rain, the big card networks and other companies have formed the Agentic Payments Alliance. 
• What's at stake: The firms hope to standardize the different protocols and internal systems for agentic commerce, such as authorization and other risks. 
• Forward look: The APA is starting with about two dozen members, but is recruiting more in the months ahead. 

With AI agents descending on different parts of finance, a coalition of payment and technology firms is attempting to keep pace with the speed of agentic artificial intelligence. 

Mastercard, Fiserv, Circle, Remitly and others are early members of the Agentic Payments Alliance, which will guide the development of new forms of AI inside the payments industry, acting as an "EMV" equivalent to ease communication between AI programs and the market of AI protocols that are emerging.  

"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, in a release.

The APA

Much of the infrastructure guiding agentic AI, such as how agents get authorized, how fraud gets caught, and how loyalty and rewards work 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.

The group is a working coalition, run collectively by founding members rather than owned by any one company. Its first initiatives include shared research and tests for AI agent identification and authorization. The APA will also develop group advocacy for regulatory issues tied to agentic commerce. 

"Agentic commerce is very early. Everyone has the question of when the big volume will hit," Sophia Goldberg, head of payments at Rain, a facilitator for the ACA, told American Banker. 

Goldberg said that as her firm was discussing agentic AI with clients and partners, many of the same subjects around protocols and risks were coming up, only in different discussions. "We're trying to be the unifying force in some of these conversations," she said. 

Rain's technology lets businesses launch payment cards funded by users' stablecoin deposits. The company says the APA puts different parties in agentic commerce in the same room, rather than having individual companies build siloed systems. 

The APA's founding members include 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. Rain will also contribute its Agentic Startup Program, an accelerator for early-stable agentic commerce companies that will be available to APA members. Many of these companies, including Visa and Mastercard, have developed tools for banks and other card issuers to use agentic commerce. 

Everyone expects agentic commerce to be big, but for that to happen, agents must be trusted by everyone, from consumers and merchants to payment companies and banks, according to Zil Bareisis, a director at Celent. 

"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," Bareisis told American Banker.  "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."

AI risks

As agentic commerce grows, new risks will emerge, such as monitoring technology that is acting autonomously. Banks aren't doing a good job of distinguishing between good bots and bad ones, Michael Rodriguez, chief growth officer at AI fraud company Darwinium, told American Banker in March. This challenge is driving moves such as Visa's recent acquisition of Biocatch.

Darwinium's bank research found 48% of respondents allow AI transactions by default, relying on after-the-fact monitoring, while 31% proactively block transactions unless explicitly allowed. And while AI agents are not widely being used to make purchases, most payment companies and banks are preparing for a time when that capability will be widely available. By 2030, McKinsey projects between $3 trillion and $5 trillion in global agentic commerce.

"This is the year AI agents stopped being an experiment and became part of how people shop, not in headline-grabbing ways but in everyday moments. What looks like small convenience today is an early signal of a much larger shift in the way we shop," wrote McKinsey in recent research on AI. "Because agents navigate the same internet as humans — visiting websites, engaging with APIs, and interacting with loyalty programs — they can scale quickly."
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In the credit card world, EMVCo — an entity that brought together all major networks: American Express, Discover, JCB, Mastercard, UnionPay and Visa — has been driving the development of security standards for card transactions for years, according to Bareisis. 

"While traditional payment networks will play a major role in agentic commerce, other players will do as well," Bareisis said. "A broad alliance, such as Agentic Payments Alliance announced here, that brings together companies from different domains, stands a better chance of becoming adopted than anything done by any of those companies individually."