The RAIN Alliance announced on 30 September 2026 that Aileen Ryan has tendered her resignation and will leave her role as President and CEO on 30 November 2026. The announcement came on the second morning of RAIN in Action 2026 in Madrid, a few hours after Ryan had delivered a keynote at the Alliance’s own flagship event.
The RAIN Alliance is the industry body behind RAIN RFID, the battery-free UHF technology built on the GS1 EPC UHF Gen2 air interface, standardised as ISO/IEC 18000-63 and operating in the 860 to 960 MHz band. It sets the market’s common language, pushes for regulatory alignment across regions and acts as the collective voice of tag, reader and software vendors along with the retailers, logistics operators and healthcare providers deploying them.
The timing is what makes this more than a routine leadership note. RAIN in Action 2026 runs from 29 September to 1 October 2026 in Madrid under the theme “From Infrastructure to Impact”, with speakers from Amazon, UPS, IKEA, H&M, Decathlon, Primark, JD Sports and Texas Children’s Hospital on the programme. Delegates who watched Ryan open proceedings from the stage learned within hours that she was leaving the organisation she has run since October 2022.
Four years of growth
Ryan joined the RAIN Alliance in October 2022 with a stated aim of harmonising the RAIN ecosystem, supporting a new phase of growth and establishing the Alliance as the dominant voice in the market. On the Alliance’s own figures, membership doubled over those four years and RAIN tag IC shipments grew by around 50% a year across the same period, which is the closest thing the sector has to a headline volume metric.
RAIN in Action itself is part of that record. The event launched in 2024, sold out in Amsterdam in 2025 and drew more than 500 delegates to Madrid in 2026, making it the largest regular gathering of the RAIN ecosystem.
Two technical milestones also landed during her tenure. RAIN RFID was recognised as a Digital Product Passport data carrier by CEN/CENELEC Joint Technical Committee 24, the European standards committee drafting the horizontal rules for the Digital Product Passport under the EU’s Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation. That recognition matters commercially, because it puts a passive UHF tag alongside QR codes and NFC as a compliant way of carrying a product’s passport identifier. Separately, the first RAIN-enabled smartphones reached the market, which is the long-awaited step towards consumers, rather than only staff with handheld readers, being able to interrogate a UHF tag.
What was said
“RAIN technology plays a critical role in enabling a smarter, more sustainable and connected world,” said Aileen Ryan, President and CEO at the RAIN Alliance. “It has been an honour to collaborate with RAIN Alliance members, regulators, legislative bodies and fellow standards groups to help industries better understand how they can harness RAIN deployments to improve traceability, operational efficiency and sustainability. I’m also incredibly proud to have established the RAIN Alliance as a trusted source and credible voice – one that is listened to and has a seat at the table where key industry decisions are made.”
“On behalf of the RAIN Alliance Board, I would like to thank Aileen for her contribution to the Alliance and the industry over the last four years,” said Jos Kunnen, Chair of the RAIN Alliance Board of Directors. “She has played a pivotal role in steering the RAIN ecosystem through its next phase of evolution and amplifying awareness of RAIN as an essential technology. We wish her every success for the future and thank her for her leadership.”
What happens next
The Alliance said its Board is focused on ensuring a smooth transition, has begun the process of determining the organisation’s future leadership and will provide further updates in due course. No successor was named in the 30 September 2026 announcement, no reason was given for the departure and no onward destination was indicated.
Ryan remains in post until 30 November 2026, so the Alliance has two months of overlap before the seat is empty. The open questions for members are whether the next chief executive comes from inside the RAIN vendor base or from the wider standards world, and whether the regulatory work on Digital Product Passports keeps its current pace through the handover. That second point is the one with a deadline attached, since the European rules the Alliance has been positioning RAIN against are still being drafted.
RFID News will publish a full write-up of Aileen Ryan’s RAIN in Action keynote on the evening of 30 September 2026.
