AI in payments: efficiency gains or strategic orchestration

Finextra, in association with Volante, will host an online webinar that examines whether artificial intelligence in payments is producing short-term efficiency gains or enabling longer-term changes in payment routing and decision-making. Registration for the event is open.

The session will bring together a panel of industry practitioners to consider whether firms are using AI mainly to improve back-office efficiency or to create a strategic layer for routing payments. The agenda includes governance, regulatory expectations and responsibility for automated decisions.

Banks and payment firms have deployed AI to streamline processing, reduce manual steps, improve exception handling and detect fraud. Panelists will review these operational results and consider whether current implementations emphasise cost and speed.

Payments now move across multiple networks and rails, including traditional bank channels, real-time schemes and newer options such as stablecoins and central bank digital currencies. A single transaction can have several possible execution paths.

Selecting an optimal route requires weighing transaction value, currency, geographic corridor, speed, cost, liquidity and risk. The webinar will examine how AI could be applied to dynamic payment orchestration that evaluates those factors and recommends a route for each payment.

Speakers will address the technical and operational challenges of embedding AI into routing decisions, including integration with existing systems and the practical limits of relying on machine-led recommendations in live payment flows.

A central topic will be accountability if an AI-generated routing decision causes financial loss, delayed settlement or a compliance breach. The discussion will cover how institutions can meet regulatory and governance expectations and what controls, transparency and audit trails firms may need to put in place.

Finextra has opened registration for the webinar, which aims to provide a forum for practitioners to assess whether AI use in payments should remain focused on efficiency or be expanded to strategic orchestration.