# Rain’s Agentic Payments Alliance Is Writing Agent Commerce Standards While Congress Stalls > Source: > Published: 2026-08-20 20:24:36+00:00 The future of money is being written in the plumbing, not the halls of Congress. On August 18, 2026, Rain launched the [Agentic Payments Alliance (APA)](https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/rain-launches-the-agentic-payments-alliance-to-guide-the-future-of-agent-driven-commerce-302853532.html), a coalition of 26 founding members including Visa, Mastercard, Fiserv, Circle, Solana, and others, all aiming to define the rules for [agentic commerce](/learn/what-is-agentic-commerce/). The industry is essentially treating the lack of federal guidance as a blank check to write its own technical and operational standards, a strategy that mirrors the playbook used by The Clearing House in its push for a tokenized deposit network. The alliance is not a product launch but a governance experiment. Its five focus areas — agent authorization, fraud detection, loyalty integration, identity standards, and regulatory advocacy — are designed to solve the friction points that currently prevent autonomous software from spending money at scale. With McKinsey projecting $3-5 trillion in global agentic commerce by 2030, the incentive to establish a common language for these transactions is immense. As Farooq Malik, co-founder and CEO of Rain, noted: “No single company should get to decide how agents transact on someone’s behalf. That has to come from the platforms building the rails, the regulators setting the rules, and the innovators closest to how agents are actually being used today. 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.” This is a classic industry maneuver: when the legislative branch stalls, the private sector builds the infrastructure that effectively becomes the law of the land. The CLARITY Act remains stuck in Congress, leaving a vacuum where a federal framework for agent payments should be. While the White House held a [White House Summit](/the-white-house-summit-isnt-a-photo-op-its-the-regulatory-architecture/) on August 19 to discuss regulatory architecture via executive-agency rulemaking, the APA is moving at the speed of code. By the time regulators finalize their rules, the industry will likely have already standardized the protocols for how agents identify themselves and authorize payments. The APA does not exist in a vacuum; it is the logical extension of existing issuer-layer efforts. Visa’s [Agentic Ready Program](/visas-agentic-ready-program-moves-issuer-layer-readiness-from-theory-to-production/) has already brought over 85 partners into a formal certification process for agent-initiated transactions. Where Visa focuses on the issuer layer, the APA aims to build the broader, cross-industry consensus required for interoperability. This is the same de facto standard playbook seen in [The Clearing House](/the-clearing-house-and-the-tokenized-deposit-gambit-2/), where 25 banks are currently building a shared tokenized deposit network. In both cases, the goal is to ensure that when the regulatory dust settles, the infrastructure is already built to the specifications of the incumbents. The participation of heavyweights like Mastercard underscores the strategic necessity of this alignment. Sherri Haymond, EVP and global head of Digital Commercialization at Mastercard, put it plainly: “The risk in a moment like this is not that the industry moves too slowly — it’s that innovation outpaces alignment. For decades, Mastercard has helped shape the standards that enable commerce at scale, and our participation in the Agentic Payments Alliance is a natural extension of that work for the agentic era.” For these firms, the risk is not just technical failure; it is the fragmentation of the payment rails they currently dominate. However, the alliance faces the inherent tension of any multi-stakeholder coalition. While the APA is described as a working coalition run collectively by its members, the interests of crypto-native protocols like Solana and Avalanche often diverge from those of traditional payment processors like Fiserv or Shift4. Balancing the need for open, decentralized standards with the security and compliance requirements of card networks will be the alliance’s primary challenge. If the APA succeeds, it will create a seamless environment for agents to transact; if it fails, the market will likely fracture into competing, proprietary silos. The APA is a bet on the inevitability of agentic commerce. By bringing together card networks, crypto-native infrastructure, and payment processors, the alliance is attempting to preempt the regulatory chaos that usually follows technological shifts. They are not waiting for permission; they are building the rails and inviting the regulators to watch. The alliance functions as a private-sector standard-setting body that effectively codifies the operational rules of the agentic economy before federal oversight can intervene.