Payments at the Speed of Change – Using AI in the New Payments Environment

Indue’s Holly McGregor joins the panel discussion at the Women in Payments Symposium 2018

Organisations are embracing intelligent automation practices such as robotic process automation (RPA), artificial/augmented intelligence (AI), cognitive and machine learning to take advantage of cost savings, efficiencies, and to address challenges such as financial crime. Layer on top of these technologies the concept of open banking, where third parties can access customer payment data, and we have a brave new world. This panel discussion at the recent Women in Payments 2018 Symposium explored the opportunities, challenges, and the need for both governance and ethics when introducing AI to consumer and corporate payments markets.

The panel at this recent session included:

• Aurelie Jacquet, Founder Ethics for AI and Automated Decision Making (ADM)
• Holly McGregor, Senior Product Manager – Orion Financial Crimes Indue
• Lauren Ryder, CEO Leading Edge Global
• Sonja Steiner, Financial Services Executive.

The session began with discussion around uptake of AI & Machine Learning (ML) and how the adoption has been quite low, with only 30% of companies even attempting some form of AI or machine learning technology in their organisation. The difference between AI and machine learning is that AI is about making decisions where the parameters have been coded by humans, but machine learning looks at past decisions to determine what future decisions should be. Although the number is low for companies using AI and machine learning, the future applications are unlimited.

Indue in early 2018 implemented AL & ML as part of our launch of the New Payments Platform. This technology has been hugely successful so far in preventing financial crimes in real time. Looking for trends allows us to be proactive to identify what’s coming up. Over time we’ll become more and more efficient as the data continues to teach us more about developing financial crime patterns and trends.

Ethics in Technology

One of the topics touched on at Women in Payments by panelist Aurelie Jacquet was the importance of having sound ethical frameworks which she stressed paved the way for success in this new era of payments. AI and open banking is about forming trust and how do you get trust? About having the right framework in place.

Jobs of tomorrow and attracting talent

How do you get your people ready for tomorrow and upskilling and attracting them to a payments future using AI technologies? By being part of talent transformation initiatives in your organisation and bringing everyone on the journey. Lauren Ryder added that this is about creating an organisation where humans and robots work together enabling humans to perform higher order tasks, with robots taking on the menial.

Trends in the Market around Data Capture

Ms Jacquet spoke about trends in Europe particularly around data management and how we’re seeing a shift to the idea of ‘small data’ where once upon a time the trend was all around big data. Some organisations are finding big data is becoming a liability with the potential for major cyber security breaches and privacy issues. Further to this, Holly McGregor commented that the more data you have the more computer and processing power you need. You need to think about focusing on what you need at an efficient cost. What are the critical data points you need?