Artificial intelligence (AI) has become the latest hot topic in payments, but where other hyped themes like mobile payments and cryptocurrency have not lived up to their potential, the possibilities of AI seems to be real – and big players are racing to get ahead in a revolution that seems to be happening right now;

Speaking from TRUSTECH 2018, Sam Murrant, Senior Payments Analyst at GlobalData, comments:

“The focus of the payments discourse has turned to AI in force this year, but unlike the hype around cryptocurrency and mobile payments (in the West), the big players are putting their money where their mouths are. With Amazon and Mastercard talking today about their use of data-driven AI in commerce and fraud prevention, respectively, it’s clear that not only is AI the talking point of the day, it is also a change that is actually happening in the market.

“As a technology, AI has extremely varied applications – hence its transformative potential for a wide variety of industries. In payments specifically, Amazon is looking to create a more ‘naturalistic’ payments journey based on conversation, with the Amazon Payments skill for its voice recognition-based AI assistant Alexa. Mastercard is looking to leverage consumer data to build smarter fraud detection algorithms, specifically to avoid challenging consumers for authentication when buying online.

“Both of the use-cases for AI seen at TRUSTECH show how AI can enable the creation of more seamless online payment experiences. Convenience, particularly in e-commerce, is highly important to consumers. Automating as much of the online payments journey as possible via AI – whether replacing the screen-based browsing with a conversation with Alexa, or replacing the password authentication with a behaviour-recognition algorithm the user never even need see – will greatly boost growth in this market.

“These technologies are already here and in widespread commercial use. The AI revolution seems well underway – its progress now is simply a matter of iterative improvement on existing models.”