Rain, the New York stablecoin payments infrastructure company, launched the Agentic Payments Alliance on August 18, 2026 with 26 named founding members, Visa and Mastercard among them. Read the launch documents closely and the four words that matter most to anyone running a card programme do not appear once: liability, chargeback, dispute, interchange. That is less an oversight than a declaration of scope: the alliance has assembled the people who will eventually decide who absorbs the loss when an agent buys the wrong thing, without deciding anything yet.
Having tracked these frameworks since Agent Pay in April 2025, the pattern holds: the industry has built machinery for proving who an agent is, and almost none for allocating loss when it gets a purchase wrong. The Agentic Payments Alliance (APA) inherits that gap.
The coalition, per Rain’s announcement, is 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 — the orchestration platform whose $45 million Series B added stablecoin rails. Rain calls the APA “a working coalition, run collectively by its founding members rather than owned by any one company,” with the charter still to be set jointly. Stated early work: shared research, testing emerging standards for agent identity and authorization, and regulatory advocacy.
So this is a convening body, not a rulebook — and it lands in a crowded room. Mastercard launched Agent Pay on April 29, 2025, binding tokenised credentials to a specific agent via Agentic Tokens. Visa introduced its Trusted Agent Protocol in October 2025, an identity wrapper that does not move money. On April 28, 2026, Google donated the Agent Payments Protocol to the FIDO Alliance, shipping version 0.2 with “Human Not Present” payments and a Verifiable Intent standard co-developed with Mastercard. Basis Theory formed the Agentic Commerce Consortium in September 2025 with Lithic and Crossmint — all three of which are now also APA founders, while Mastercard sits in the APA and donates standards to FIDO. The same firms are staffing multiple rooms — a hedge, not convergence. Zil Bareisis, a director at Celent, told American Banker that competing approaches “must converge to achieve scale.”
“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. Farooq Malik, co-founder and chief executive of Rain, framed the governance case directly: “No single company should get to decide how agents transact on someone’s behalf.” That call, he said, has to come jointly from the platforms building the rails, the regulators setting the rules and the innovators closest to how agents are used today.
The candid version sits on Rain’s own compliance blog, not in the alliance release. “Where does liability sit when the entity transacting isn’t human? The honest answer is we don’t know, at least not fully,” wrote Kevin Carr, Rain’s chief compliance officer, in a post arguing that Know Your Agent is an extension of Know Your Customer. Agents are onboarded as extensions of the customer, and Rain vets the underlying model first, on the basis that an Anthropic-powered agent does not behave identically to an OpenAI-powered one. The bind Carr identifies is sharper than anything in the launch copy: rapid transaction sequences from many simultaneous IP addresses are textbook fraud indicators and also inherent to how agents work. “The agent did it” cannot become a cardholder loophole, he writes, yet the framework must still allow for errors that are not fraud.
That is what the APA has convened around without answering, and it matters to anyone issuing, acquiring or orchestrating. Card-network liability allocation assumes a cardholder who either authorised a transaction or did not; an agent acting inside pre-authorised parameters that buys the wrong thing fits neither box. So controls are migrating upstream: Rain’s Agent Control Layer, in beta, enforces merchant allowlists, amount caps and expiry at card issuance rather than after the fact. Compliance teams show the same instinct — see TransFi building KYC and chain monitoring in house — while Citi’s purchase of Kard puts a card-linked rewards rail in play that agents must eventually carry.
Rain has the balance sheet to convene. Founded in 2021 by Malik and Charles Naut, it closed a $250 million Series C led by ICONIQ on January 9, 2026 at a $1.95 billion valuation, taking total funding past $338 million. It reports over $3 billion in annualised transactions across more than 200 partners, including Western Union and Nuvei, and is a Visa and Mastercard Principal Member. The prize it cites: McKinsey’s projection of $3 trillion to $5 trillion in global agentic commerce by 2030.
The prediction: the APA’s identity workstream should produce something usable within two quarters, because Visa, Mastercard and FIDO are already converging there. Loss allocation will move far more slowly, because no coalition can settle it — it needs operating-rule changes the two schemes make unilaterally, plus a US regulatory view on whether an agent-initiated debit counts as authorised for Regulation E purposes. Until then, issuers and programme managers should assume they carry the residual risk and price it. The alliance’s silence on the point is the most honest thing about it.
Rick Steves
Rick Steves has seen business and economics through many lenses. He joined the financial services industry in 2009, and has been a financial journalist since 2011. He holds a degree in Business Administration and has experience producing real-time news, from both buy-side and sell-side, as well as for retail traders, brokers and service providers. Steves' work has appeared in a variety of online publications including FX Street, NewsBTC, FinanceFeeds, and The Industry Spread. Rick has great interest in the dynamics of the trading industry. The never-ending clash between technology, economics, regulation, and more importantly, the people.
