AI’s role in payments: efficiency vs orchestration

Volante will host an online webinar to assess whether payments firms use artificial intelligence mainly to cut costs and speed processing or to redesign how payments are routed. The session will feature Nadish Lad, Volante’s global head of product and strategic business, with industry editor Teresa Connors moderating.

Financial institutions have applied AI in payments to streamline operations, reduce manual steps, improve exception handling and strengthen fraud detection. These uses have helped firms lower costs and accelerate processing times.

Payment infrastructure now includes traditional banking networks, real-time payment schemes, new payment rails and digital assets such as stablecoins and central bank digital currencies. Each transaction can move across multiple possible routes and systems.

Choosing a route can depend on transaction value, currency, corridor, speed, cost, liquidity and compliance risk. Organisers say those trade-offs can make manual routing decisions impractical for every payment.

Panelists will discuss using AI as a strategic layer to perform dynamic payment orchestration. Machine learning models would assess available routes and data in real time to select the most suitable option for each payment, which could lower cost, improve speed and reduce settlement failures.

The deeper use of AI in payment decision-making raises questions about responsibility and control. If an AI-recommended route leads to loss, delay or regulatory breaches, firms must determine whether accountability rests with the institution, the vendors that supply the models or the staff who oversee them. The webinar will examine governance models, auditability and how to make AI decisions explainable to regulators and customers.

Speakers will also address regulatory expectations for model risk management, record-keeping and incident response. The panel will consider how firms can deploy AI while meeting requirements for documentation and explainable outcomes.

Organisers describe the session as a comparison of short-term operational benefits with potential longer-term effects on payment networks and cross-border flows. The host provided registration details for interested attendees.