Cross River Expands Stripe Issuing Partnership to Help Power Agentic Commerce

Long-standing partnership and regulatory expertise enable trusted payment infrastructure for AI-driven commerce

FORT LEE, N.J.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Cross River Bank ("Cross River"), a technology infrastructure provider that offers embedded financial solutions, today announced that it is expanding its partnership with Stripe to help power Stripe’s card issuing capabilities for agentic commerce. The partnership enables Stripe to offer businesses a secure, compliant way for agents to pay with cards on behalf of verified users. The initiative extends a relationship that began in 2019 when the two companies teamed up to power push-to-card payments for the marketplace economy.

"Consumers and businesses are increasingly relying on agents to act on their behalf, but the payments infrastructure hasn't kept pace,” said Gilles Gade, Founder and CEO of Cross River. “Cross River has spent years building reliable, scalable, and adaptable banking infrastructure for exactly these moments. Our partnership with Stripe brings that to the agent economy at scale. This is why the most innovative companies in the world build on Cross River."

Enabling agents to pay requires more than connecting them to existing payment rails. It requires issuing infrastructure that supports payment credentials bound to a specific user's authorization, constrained by amount, merchant, and context, and that verifies both the end user and the agent acting on their behalf. When an AI agent needs to make a purchase, Link’s agent wallet issues a restricted, single-use virtual card scoped to that specific transaction, so the agent can complete the purchase without accessing the customer's underlying payment details. For businesses and developers building their own agentic applications, Stripe enables fully programmatic card issuance through Stripe’s API.

Underpinning both is a partnership built on Cross River’s banking core, ensuring agent-initiated transactions meet card network rules, AML requirements, and KYC protocols.

"Scaling agentic commerce requires banking partners who understand both the regulatory requirements and the pace at which we need to move. Cross River delivered on both, and that’s what makes this partnership work," said John Piazza, Issuing Product Lead at Stripe.

"The core challenge in agentic commerce is trust: establishing that a transaction reflects genuine business intent, carried out by a verified agent, within the scope that the user authorized," said Pravesh Rijal, Chief AI Officer at Cross River. “What we've built with Stripe addresses that directly. This is the first layer of what we are building at Cross River – a complete agentic banking infrastructure purpose-built for a world where agents and humans transact side by side.”

This is the first capability in what Cross River expects to be a broader suite of banking infrastructure solutions for agentic finance. The company remains focused on ensuring that as commerce evolves, the trust, compliance, and reliability consumers expect from financial services evolve with it.

About Cross River
Cross River builds technology that powers the future of financial services. Leveraging its proprietary real-time digital banking core, Cross River delivers innovative and scalable embedded payments, cards, lending and crypto solutions to millions of consumers and businesses. Cross River is backed by leading investors and serves the world’s most essential technology and fintech companies at the forefront of innovation. As a leader in the industry, Cross River is reshaping global finance and financial inclusion. Member FDIC. Find out more at www.crossriver.com.