Behind the buy: building Rain's stored value layer with Ansa

Rain powers the full flow of money, including card issuing, embedded wallets, and money movement, through a single platform. A key part of our product strategy is to give partners a permanent place in their customers' routines, where every purchase strengthens the relationship instead of ending it.

Today, Rain is announcing its acquisition of Ansa, a platform built for branded stored value and closed-loop payments, and we're welcoming their team as the newest Rainmakers.

"Every great merchant or consumer brand eventually wants their own version of the Starbucks wallet, but very few have the infrastructure to pull it off," said Sophia Goldberg, Ansa's founder, who is joining Rain as Head of Payments. "Bringing that expertise onto Rain's platform means partners can offer their customers a branded app with spending power, rewards, and a card that works across multiple locations, all in one place."

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Why stored value matters

Stored value isn't a new idea. Starbucks proved over a decade ago that a well-designed branded wallet can become one of a company's most valuable assets, holding well over a billion dollars in customer balances and turning routine purchases into daily habits. Few brands have matched that model since, mostly because the infrastructure behind it, POS integrations, incentive tooling, reconciliation, fraud controls, redemption across app, web, and in-store, has been expensive and slow to build from scratch.

Ansa built that infrastructure so any merchant could offer a version of the same experience. A prefunded wallet keeps everyday spend inside a brand's own ecosystem, and incentives with built-in expiration turn a one-time reward into a reason to come back this week rather than sometime next quarter. Programs built this way tend to follow a familiar pattern, with customers visiting more often, spending more per visit, and costing less to serve.

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Ansa built on rails that merchants already use

Stored value sounds great to a merchant right up until they ask how customers actually pay with it in-store. Most merchants already have a point-of-sale system they like, and asking them to rip it out or bolt on new hardware is where these programs usually die. Ansa solved that problem, and it's where their real innovation happened.

Ansa struck a truly novel arrangement with Mastercard that let a stored balance spend in-store over Mastercard's own rails, using the exact same terminal a merchant already had. If a merchant already accepted Mastercard, they could accept an Ansa-powered wallet without touching their hardware or software at all. Online and in-app, the experience worked differently. Instead of riding a card network, the transaction would ping Ansa's API directly for authorization.

That solved a real problem, but it was still a closed-loop program by design. A cardholder could spend their stored balance at the merchant who issued it, and nowhere else. Now that Ansa is part of Rain, that changes. Paired with Rain's own work as a Mastercard Principal Member and Visa issuer, partners will be able to extend a stored balance beyond a single merchant's own registers, accepted on both Visa and Mastercard rails at participating business.

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New experiences for partners

This isn't the first time we've added a layer to Rain's platform to unlock experiences partners couldn't build on their own. In 2025, Rain acquired Uptop, bringing card-linked rewards to sports and entertainment, powering programs for fans of the Cleveland Cavaliers, the Detroit Pistons, LSU athletics, and more.

Ansa's stored value and incentive tooling adds another dimension to that vision, and now that Ansa is part of Rain, it can go further than a single merchant. Picture a team or venue giving fans a branded wallet loaded with credits for concessions and merch, rewards that show up automatically when they spend, and a card that works at the venue and, thanks to Rain's own Visa and Mastercard relationships, at the restaurants and bars around it too, so a fan's night doesn't have to end at the gate.

But it's more than just sports and entertainment. A hotel brand could give guests a reloadable balance that covers everything from the minibar to a future stay. A cruise line could put a single onboard wallet in every passenger's hand, good at every bar, shop, and excursion desk on the ship. A theme park could load a family's tickets, food credits, and merchandise budget onto one card that taps at every gate and register. In each case, a branded wallet holds credits and rewards that are spendable everywhere the brand's customers already are, on a card that can be easily configured for purchases at a wide range of merchants that accept Visa and Mastercard.

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A glimpse at what's next: agentic payments

Rain has been building toward a future where agents transact as capably and safely as people do. Scoped cards and controlled agentic payments already give an AI agent a tightly bounded budget to spend on someone's behalf, rather than an uncapped balance, the same principle behind a spending balance scoped to specific restaurants around an arena, just aimed at agents instead of fans. That foundation rests on the same core capability Ansa has spent years perfecting, a programmable balance with rules attached that governs who can spend it, where, how much, and for how long before it expires.

Ansa's team has built and hardened that kind of programmable, rules-based balance at scale, today for people rather than agents. As agentic commerce moves from concept to production, that experience gives Rain a real head start. Sophia will have a direct hand in shaping this work, and we'll share more on where it goes in the months ahead.

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The founder behind Ansa‍

Ansa was founded and led by Sophia Goldberg, who is joining Rain as Head of Payments. She spent several years at Adyen managing global accounts and product before founding Ansa, and along the way wrote The Field Guide to Global Payments, a widely read book on how money moves around the world. American Banker named her one of its Innovators of the Year in 2024, and QSR Magazine and NYC Fintech Women have recognized her work as well. At Rain, she'll lead payments strategy with a front-row seat to both the stored value work described above and what comes next in agentic commerce.

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Looking ahead

Card issuing makes money spendable. Stored value is what keeps that spend inside a brand's own ecosystem, turning a single purchase into a habit and a habit into loyalty, all without asking customers to give up the acceptance they expect from modern payments. Bringing Ansa's team and technology into Rain gives partners a way to build all of that from a single platform.

We're excited to welcome the Ansa team to Rain, and even more excited about the kinds of programs our partners will be able to build with embedded wallets, rewards, and stablecoins working together.

If you're building a program where you want your customers' funds, and their loyalty, to stay inside your ecosystem, we'd love to talk.