AI in payments: from efficiency to orchestration

Finextra and Volante will host a webinar featuring Nadish Lad, global head of product and strategic business at Volante Technologies, with Teresa Connors, contributing editor at Finextra, as moderator. The session will examine whether AI in payments should move beyond short-term efficiency gains toward acting as a strategic layer for payment routing and accountability.

Speakers will outline current uses of AI in payments, including reducing manual tasks, speeding exception handling and improving fraud detection. Firms have reported measurable efficiency gains from automating routine work and applying machine learning to identify suspicious patterns, resulting in lower operating costs and faster processing times.

The panel will address changes in the payments landscape. Transactions can now travel via traditional banking systems, real-time schemes and new rails such as stablecoins and central bank digital currencies. Multiple networks, currencies and asset types increase the number of possible routes for a single payment and add variables that make manual route selection difficult.

One topic will be dynamic payment orchestration, where automated systems evaluate factors such as transaction value, currency, corridor, speed, cost, liquidity and risk to select a route. Panelists will describe how orchestration could optimise cost and speed and manage liquidity and exposure across multiple providers and rails. Deploying such systems would move AI from a support tool into a decision-making layer.

Speakers will also consider accountability and governance. If an AI-recommended route causes loss, delay or a regulatory breach, responsibility may rest with the model vendor, the institution that adopted the model or the staff who set its operating parameters. Regulators and industry bodies are increasing expectations for transparency, auditability and risk controls around automated decision-making, and firms will need to align operational practices with those standards.

The webinar agenda includes near-term operational benefits and longer-term effects on how money moves between parties and across jurisdictions. Panel discussion points will include technical design choices, model validation, oversight mechanisms and ways to document decision logic so outcomes can be explained to customers and regulators.

Background material for the session notes that AI is already delivering measurable savings and performance gains in payments while payment corridors and asset types grow more complex. The webinar will examine whether AI will primarily improve existing processes or change routing, liquidity management and cross-border flows.