Rain just launched the Agentic Payments Alliance

Hey Payment Fanatic!

I wanted to start with this one because Rain is bringing some very big names together — Visa, Mastercard, Fiserv, Circle, Solana, Remitly, and others — to figure out how AI agents will actually make payments.

What I find interesting is that they’re not just talking about faster payments. They’re working on the harder questions around authorization, fraud, identity and standards before agentic commerce gets too far ahead of the infrastructure.

And there’s a compliance story worth keeping an eye on too: CRS 2.0 is expanding reporting requirements to areas like regulated stablecoins and CBDCs, which means fintechs will need much better data and monitoring processes behind the scenes.

Anyway, let’s get into today’s Payments stories. 👇 See you tomorrow!

Cheers,

Marcel

INSIGHTS

💡 Taxbit: CRS 2.0 — Preparing for Expanded Digital Asset Reporting. CRS 2.0 expands the existing reporting framework to cover certain electronic money products, CBDCs, regulated stablecoins, and indirect crypto exposure, creating new data and operational requirements for financial institutions. Companies now need to determine whether they fall under CRS 2.0, CARF, or both, while updating onboarding, KYC, account classification, monitoring, and reporting workflows to capture the required data and remain audit-ready. Taxbit enables and automates dual-regime compliance in one platform. Read the full article here

NEWS

🇲🇽 Unlimit supports the digitalisation of Mexico's education sector through a partnership with Mattilda. The integration provides digital payment processing for debit, credit, instalments, and SPEI methods while enabling expansion into additional Latin American markets.

🇺🇸 Rain launches the Agentic Payments Alliance, a coalition including Visa, Mastercard, Fiserv, Circle, Solana, and Remitly. The group aims to define standards for agent authorization, fraud detection, and loyalty as McKinsey projects up to $5 trillion in agentic commerce by 2030.

🇺🇸 Cash App expands crypto support beyond bitcoin and USDC via MoonPay, giving its 50 million users access to assets including ether, solana, and USDT. Eligible users can purchase digital assets directly using their Cash App balances.

🇺🇸 Kraken's FinTech app launches a cashback U.S. debit card, competing directly with CashApp, Venmo, and Robinhood. The Krak Card offers up to 2% cash or bitcoin back and lets users spend from over 600 currencies and crypto assets at the point of purchase.

🇨🇳 Alipay launches full-stack agentic commerce platform in China. The platform enables autonomous AI agents to browse, select, and transact on behalf of users within the Alipay ecosystem.

🇵🇭 Paymentology powers GoTyme Bank's Apple Pay integration in the Philippines. GoTyme became the first Philippine digital bank to support Apple Pay for its 10 million customers on August 4, enabling contactless payments via tokenised debit cards.

🇮🇳 Razorpay launches Vulcan, a payments AI foundation model built with NVIDIA and AWS. Trained on nearly 3 trillion data points across 4 billion payments, early components delivered an 8-10% improvement in payment success rates.

🇺🇸 Stripe expands multicurrency settlement and adds instant FX conversion, helping global businesses avoid double conversion fees. Cross-border volume on the platform has grown over 40% annually since 2018.

🇺🇸 Circle expands cirBTC access to all Circle Mint users on Ethereum. The Bitcoin-backed token is held by Circle National Trust, and all Mint users can now mint and redeem cirBTC directly.

🇰🇷 Ripple partners with South Korea's Jeonbuk Bank for cross-border payments. The regional bank will use Ripple's technology to enable faster international transfers for its customers.

🇺🇸 Visa is looking for a new stablecoin settlement partner after Mastercard's acquisition of BVNK. The company has issued an RFP seeking a provider that can support a range of stablecoins for settlement.

🇺🇸 Clearhaven Partners makes a strategic investment in PayQuicker, the global payout orchestration platform. PayQuicker enables enterprises to send compliant, real-time payouts across more than 210 countries and territories via a single API.

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