Visa and Mastercard back new Agentic Payments Alliance

Visa and Mastercard have joined the Agentic Payments Alliance (APA), a coalition of organisations working together to help guide the development of AI commerce.

The alliance is the brainchild of stablecoin platform Rain, Finextra reports.

It will operate as a working coalition, run collectively by its founding members. Its members - already numbering more than 25 - will set its charter and mission together.

Early work is expected to include shared research and frameworks, testing emerging standards for agent identity and authorisation, and advocacy on the regulatory questions agentic commerce raises.

"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," says Farooq Malik, CEO, Rain.

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