Cross River has expanded its card issuing partnership with Stripe to provide payment infrastructure for agentic commerce.
The expanded partnership is designed to let Stripe offer businesses a way for AI agents to make card payments on behalf of verified users, within a framework that ties transactions to a user's authorisation.
The arrangement builds on a relationship between the two companies that began in 2019, when Cross River and Stripe worked together to support push-to-card payments for marketplace platforms.
Issuing infrastructure for agent-initiated payments
According to Cross River, enabling agents to transact requires more than connecting them to existing payment rails. It requires issuing infrastructure that supports payment credentials bound to a specific user's authorisation and constrained by factors such as amount, merchant, and context, while verifying both the end user and the agent acting on their behalf.
Under the partnership, Stripe's Link agent wallet issues a restricted, single-use virtual card scoped to a specific transaction when an AI agent needs to make a purchase. This process allows the agent to complete the purchase without accessing the underlying payment details of the customer. In addition, for businesses and developers building agentic applications of their own, Stripe also offers programmatic card issuance through its application programming interface (API).
Cross River's banking infrastructure underpins both capabilities. The company has stated that agent-initiated transactions are structured to meet card network rules, along with anti-money laundering (AML) and know-your-customer (KYC) requirements.
Pravesh Rijal, Chief AI Officer at Cross River, said the expanded partnership is intended to establish that a transaction reflects genuine business intent, carried out by a verified agent, within the scope authorised by the user. Furthermore, John Piazza, Issuing Product Lead at Stripe, said that scaling agentic commerce depends on banking partners able to address both regulatory requirements and the pace of development required by the sector.
Broader plans for agentic finance
Cross River has described the card issuing capability as the first in what it expects to be a broader set of banking infrastructure offerings for agentic finance. The Fort Lee, New Jersey-based company has stated that it intends to continue developing infrastructure aimed at supporting compliance and reliability as commerce involving both human and AI-agent transactions continues to develop.
The expansion comes as payment providers examine how existing card networks, issuing processes, and verification frameworks can accommodate transactions initiated by AI agents rather than directly by consumers. Agentic commerce, in which software agents complete purchases or other financial actions on behalf of a user, has drawn increasing attention from payments companies seeking to adapt authorisation, fraud prevention, and compliance mechanisms originally designed for human-initiated transactions.
