Mastercard, Visa, Circle Form Agentic AI Payments Standards Group

A coalition of payment and technology firms is trying to keep agentic artificial intelligence from fragmenting into incompatible silos. Mastercard, Visa, Fiserv, Circle, Remitly and more than two dozen other companies have formed the Agentic Payments Alliance, a working group meant to develop shared standards for AI agents that make payments.

The alliance aims to become the EMVCo of agentic commerce – a single forum where protocols for authorization, fraud detection, loyalty and rewards get defined before individual companies lock in their own approaches. "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.

Much of the infrastructure that agentic AI needs is still being built. How an AI agent gets authorized to spend, how good bots are distinguished from bad ones, how fraud gets caught in real time – none of that has a settled answer. 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, not 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 alliance, told American Banker. Goldberg said that as her firm discussed agentic AI with clients and partners, the same subjects around protocols and risks kept surfacing, only in different conversations. "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 full founding membership includes 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-stage 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. For that to happen, agents must be trusted by everyone – consumers, merchants, 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. "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."

As agentic commerce grows, new risks will emerge. Monitoring technology that acts autonomously is one. Banks are not 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. That 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. Another 31% proactively block transactions unless explicitly allowed. And while AI agents are not yet widely 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," McKinsey wrote in recent research. "Because agents navigate the same internet as humans – visiting websites, engaging with APIs, and interacting with loyalty programs – they can scale quickly."

In the credit card world, EMVCo – the entity that brought together American Express, Discover, JCB, Mastercard, UnionPay and Visa – has driven security standards for card transactions for years, Bareisis said. "While traditional payment networks will play a major role in agentic commerce, other players will do as well. 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."

Mastercard is a founding member. The company has also tested single-audit stablecoin compliance with Borderless.xyz, part of its broader push into crypto-adjacent payments infrastructure.