Collaborating with AI to shape the future of payments

The world of payments has changed more in the last five years then the past 50. This pace of change has brought new players and new technologies into the ecosystem that have delivered greater choice, flexibility and user experience.

As time goes by, we are becoming more and more familiar with the idea and use cases for AI, but what’s preventing it from reaching its full potential and what are the benefits if it does? Recent research¹ from Visa found that although almost 80% of European consumers were aware of AI, only 25% would trust it with important personal information such as financial data.

For AI to thrive over the next decade and deliver the types of seamless personalised experiences we’ll come to expect, we need to treat it as a collaborative partner. The perception it’s just another tool is already outdated, as pioneers harness AI to push the boundaries of human/machine interaction. However, for this progress to materialise into the mainstream, several factors need to be considered:

• The proliferation of trust: As our research shows, there’s still a way to go for consumers to put their financial lives into the hands of AI.
  
• The confidence of security: Building on trust, consumers need to feel comfortable that their information is secure and not vulnerable to fraud.
  
• The democratisation of data: A shift in how data is utilised and increased consumer confidence that businesses are using it responsibly.
  

This last point around data is especially key, as it underpins AI and how it performs. The more data that is available, the better the inferencing capabilities of AI to deliver accurate experiences, protect us from fraud and continue to learn and improve. However, more needs to be done to put greater control and consent into the hands of consumers and small businesses. The ethical, responsible use of data to enable AI to help promote and protect our economies is foundational to Europe embracing the next frontier of commerce.

What’s the next step? Getting from AI to B
Going back to the research, Visa found encouraging results when it came to European consumers embracing the broad benefits of AI, showing an appetite to adopt it in their lives:

• 41% believed AI can have a positive impact on their home and personal life
  
• 46% said AI can have a positive impact on work life
  
• 43% have a positive view on AI and its capabilities overall
  
• 55% said it can help them save time
  

Building on this, recent economic forecasting from Visa found that Europeans could save up to €250 billion more every year if they embraced digital management tools like AI to help manage their finances².

So, the obvious potential is there – from a behavioural and economic point of view – but what does this mean in reality? We are at a dawn of a new era, shifting from predictive AI to generative AI. This could represent the biggest inflection point since the rise of the internet itself as the technology catches up with human intelligence. How we shop and pay for everyday items will be unrecognisable from today, powered by hyper-personalised user experiences from merchants and retailers.

With the right headwind, AI could transform global processes and practices, creating a more streamlined, productive and creative approach to areas of huge importance and impact in today’s society:

• Education: AI could enable virtual teachers and personalised training curriculums to suit different students. It could reduce the digital divide to democratise education around the world, making knowledge more accessible and immersive and generating more global equity in this space.
  
• Medicine: AI could provide medical systems and tools with all available knowledge throughout history to help with diagnosis and prevention. It could help with the generation and discoveries of new medicines and cures, while accelerating clinical trials.
  
• Climate Change: AI could help create specific engineering models for global temperature control, sustainable food production and more accurate climate disaster prediction.
  
• Retail & Fashion: AI could support recommerce practices in the fashion and wider retail industries, cutting down on waste production and creating more seamless supply chains.
  
• Creative Arts: AI could be a supporting partner to the very essence of humanity – the ability to be creative, whether that’s composing a song or writing a story. Gen AI could supercharge a body of work for existing gifted artists, or support those who have a creative mindset but not a technical resource or specific talent.
  
• Personal Assistants: An AI-powered digital assistant could consolidate all your individual digital relationships (all apps, socials, shopping, banks, emails, streaming platforms etc) to help manage payments, preferences and choices.
  

It sounds wonderful. But is it safe?
There’s no doubt that AI, underpinned by the ethical use of data, can be a force for good and will dramatically change our lives once fully adopted. But there’s a catch, AI is also powering a range of different ways fraudulent actors can target consumers and businesses, from deepfakes and phishing to more sophisticated AI-generated malware, ID impersonations and automated hacking. Despite positive feedback from European consumers on the broad benefits of AI, our research also found that only 34% felt AI could keep them safe online.

However, it’s not all doom and gloom, as Rajat Taneja, President of Technology at Visa outlines in this blog, there are hundreds of AI products battling to protect buyers, sellers and financial institutions. Over the last 10 years Visa spent more than $3 billion on AI and data infrastructure³ to help enable the safer, smarter movement of money and to proactively identify and help prevent fraud. A groundbreaking recent pilot⁴ showed that Visa’s new AI tool could potentially save the UK over £330m a year on fraud and APP scams, demonstrating how Visa is stepping up the fight against fraud and has been using AI for decades to protect the payments ecosystem.

Visa’s AI technology analyses billions of transactions each year, generating a risk score indicating the likelihood of an account-to-account payment being part of fraudulent activity. This in turn helps banks protect their customers from falling victim to scammers and all takes place within the blink of an eye, without any inconvenience to the speed and reliability of account-to-account payments.

Visa was the first network to deploy AI-based technology for risk and fraud management, pioneering the use of AI models in payments security for over 30 years, and this is just the latest example of the power of this technology, working alongside human expertise.

More AI-volution than Revolution
The future is bright for AI and the possibilities it holds. It’s driving consumer expectations – with 41% of consumers wanting AI to improve their online shopping experience and 38% saying AI can help create a seamless payment or banking experience – and it is ready to meet, and exceed, these demands.

With all this in mind, we have a collective responsibility globally to create the necessary oversight and regulation, given AI doesn’t have borders. Visa is already part of multiple global AI consortiums and is at the forefront of driving the ethical use of the technology to support customers around the world. As these processes develop and become ubiquitous, confidence will grow further and then the future possibilities are endless.