Study Finds AI Must Earn the Right to Move Money

Enterprise artificial intelligence promises nearly as many different business outcomes as there are businesses themselves. It comes as little surprise, then, that the AI race inside enterprise technology is already starting to split along sector lines.

New research in the June edition of The Enterprise AI Benchmark Report from PYMNTS Intelligence revealed that cybersecurity firms are deploying AI broadly, while software-as-a-service companies are using it to accelerate growth, product development and competitive positioning. Payments providers, however, are putting AI closest to the transaction layer and asking it to prove its value before it scales. That may look like caution. It may also be the more important signal.

Payments Firms Are Turning AI Into an ROI Test, Not a Tech Rollout

AI is not developing as one horizontal technology wave. It is being shaped by each sector’s operating model. For payments, that model is unforgiving. The sector sits where software touches money movement, fraud exposure, compliance requirements, settlement accuracy and customer trust. That makes AI less of a productivity experiment and more of an operating-control question.

Payments companies are not short on AI use cases. Fraud review, chargeback management, transaction monitoring, merchant onboarding, reconciliation, customer service, authorization optimization and compliance workflows all contain the kind of high-volume, pattern-heavy activity AI is built to improve.

The issue is not whether payments firms can deploy AI more widely. It is whether they can deploy it safely, profitably and visibly enough to give it more responsibility.

The report found that 80% of payments firms cited risk and compliance reduction as reasons for funding AI, while 70% cited margins and profitability. Another 80% cited productivity or efficiency gains, and 75% cited financial return on investment.

Read the report: New Data Shows How Tech Sectors Are Turning AI Into Strategy

The priorities show how AI is being judged. In payments, the business case is not simply faster work or better interfaces. AI must reduce exposure, strengthen economics or remove friction from workflows that directly affect the movement and management of money.

A model that touches underwriting, risk scoring, suspicious activity, merchant behavior, refunds, disputes or reconciliation cannot be evaluated the same way as an AI sales assistant or product copilot. The cost of a bad recommendation is not only operational. It can become regulatory, financial and reputational.

Payments firms may become one of the first sectors to define what governed AI looks like in practice. The questions are specific. Is the model making final decisions or recommendations? Can teams audit the output? Can the firm explain why a transaction, merchant or dispute was flagged? Does the AI reduce false positives, or simply move the workload to another queue? Does it improve authorization rates without increasing fraud losses? Does it accelerate reconciliation without creating new exception risk?

The narrowness of payments AI adoption may be the point. Payments firms are concentrating AI near workflows that determine revenue, risk and operational efficiency. That makes the payments use case different from sectors where AI can be deployed first and governed later. In payments, governance is part of the deployment.

Payments firms are not necessarily behind in AI. They are applying a different test. Where SaaS asks whether AI can drive growth, and cybersecurity asks whether it can strengthen protection, payments asks whether AI can be trusted around money.

These are the conditions under which AI becomes usable in financial infrastructure.

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