Fort Lee-based Cross River Bank on Wednesday announced an expansion of its long-standing partnership with Stripe. The collaboration is designed to provide the secure, compliant banking infrastructure necessary to support the growing field of “agentic commerce”—the emerging era where AI agents act on behalf of humans to conduct financial transactions.
The initiative builds on a relationship that began in 2019, when the two companies first collaborated to power push-to-card payments for the marketplace economy.
As businesses and consumers increasingly adopt AI agents to manage tasks, existing payment systems have struggled to keep pace. The core challenge in this space is establishing “trust”—verifying that a transaction reflects genuine user intent and is conducted by a verified agent within pre-authorized constraints.
Under the new expanded partnership, Stripe will leverage Cross River’s banking core to issue payment credentials that are bound to a specific user’s authorization. These credentials are constrained by amount, merchant, and context. For instance, when an AI agent initiates a purchase, the system can issue a restricted, single-use virtual card scoped to that specific transaction, ensuring the agent completes the purchase without ever accessing the customer’s underlying payment details.
“Consumers and businesses are increasingly relying on agents to act on their behalf, but the payments infrastructure hasn’t kept pace,” Gilles Gade, founder and CEO of Cross River said. “Our partnership with Stripe brings [reliable, scalable infrastructure] to the agent economy at scale.”
This collaboration represents the first step in a broader roadmap for Cross River. The firm intends to build a comprehensive suite of banking infrastructure solutions purpose-built for a world where AI agents and humans transact side by side.
“Scaling agentic commerce requires banking partners who understand both the regulatory requirements and the pace at which we need to move,” John Piazza, Issuing Product lead at Stripe said. “Cross River delivered on both, and that’s what makes this partnership work.”
Pravesh Rijal, Chief AI Officer at Cross River, emphasized that the new infrastructure ensures agent-initiated transactions strictly adhere to card network rules, Anti-Money Laundering (AML) requirements, and Know Your Customer (KYC) protocols. “What we’ve built with Stripe addresses [the trust challenge] directly,” Rijal said. “This is the first layer of what we are building at Cross River—a complete agentic banking infrastructure.”
For developers building agentic applications, this capability is now accessible through Stripe’s API, allowing for fully programmatic card issuance that balances the speed of AI with the security and compliance requirements of modern banking.
