Artificial intelligence is moving quickly from trial projects to everyday use in payments. It is already helping firms fight fraud, streamline compliance and speed up transactions, while raising new questions about trust, oversight and customer impact.
In the latest Payments Power 50 podcast, industry experts Neira Jones and David Birch explore one of the most important transitions underway in financial services, the move from AI as an internal tool to AI as a consumer facing force that could fundamentally rewrite how payments operate.
Their conversation goes far beyond fraud detection or compliance automation. Instead, it raises the question that few in the industry are prepared to answer, what happens when consumers themselves begin delegating their financial lives to autonomous agents.
The pair also examines implications for retailers and banks. Hyper personalised marketing, nudging and website design become irrelevant when consumer bots make decisions. Merchants will need their own bots to engage with customer agents directly. Price, response time, API reliability and data richness become new levers of competition. The science of customer acquisition must be reinvented for non human decision makers.
