Visa and Mastercard join a cross-industry alliance on agent-initiated payments

Stablecoin infrastructure firm Rain has convened the Agentic Payments Alliance with more than 25 founding members, including both global card networks, to work on agent identity, authorisation, and the rules for AI-initiated purchases. What changed The alliance is a working coalition rather than a company-owned programme: members set the charter collectively and no single participant owns it. Its stated early agenda is shared research and frameworks, testing emerging standards for how a payment agent is identified and authorised, and advocacy on the regulatory questions agent-initiated commerce raises. The founding list spans card networks, processors, stablecoin issuers, blockchains, and risk vendors — Visa, Mastercard, Fiserv, Circle, Solana, Remitly, Shift4, Evertec, Lithic, Episode Six, Sardine, Chainalysis, Fireblocks, Uniswap Labs, Avalanche, Basis Theory, Coinflow, Crossmint, delta Network, Kala, Monad, PayOS, Rain, Rialo by Subzero Labs, Turnkey, and Yuno. Mastercard framed its participation as an extension of its standards work into the agentic era. No scheme rule has changed yet; what has changed is that the standards conversation for agent authorisation now has a named forum with both networks inside it.