GenAI’s Role in Commercial Payments: Big Impact, No Miracles
GenAI will transform all systems connecting to payments, not the payment itself.
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HSBC with a great read that contains some more granular examples of how GenAI will bring value to commercial payments and treasury management.
Interestingly, this report shows that the top use cases are customer service, and operations and support.
This shouldn’t come as a surprise. GenAI’s “raison d'être " in every industry is now streamlining customer interaction, but don’t expect GenAI to transform the actual payments.
Treasury and finance departments are also likely to get a big boost. A great GenAI use case is automating payment processing and reconciliation, and matching payments with invoices. How long this will take to develop a GenAi to do this is anyone’s guess.
What is interesting is that this report is less commitalnclusive for those expecting GenAI to perform miracles and transform the payments themselves.
On the actual payment side, the use cases HSBC proposes for GenAI are in fraud detection, where GenAI is untested.
For example, “Irregular spending detection,” a suggested use, has been performed by machine learning AI for years, while GenAI is still untested in this function. Can GenAI do that much better? That’s a big unknown.
I also don’t expect miracles in the KYC/AML use case. GenAI can certainly be useful in searching for corporate identity, but will it do any better than a human? AML/KYC depends on connecting the dots between companies where data isn’t readily available. That’s the confounding world in which illegal transfers live.
GenAI will undoubtedly have a big impact on commercial payments, but it will be in the activities surrounding the management of payments before or after sending them.
👉 AI Use Cases in Commercial Payments With Examples
1️⃣ Client Servicing
• Virtual assistant for staff handling client queries ✅
• Summarisation of correspondence for efficient case handling ✅
• Process and knowledge management ✅
• Analysis based on recent transaction history ✅
2️⃣ Sales and Marketing
• Request for proposal (“RFP”) ✅
• Sales enablement ✅
• Product and market knowledge management ✅
3️⃣ Treasury and Finance
• Automated payments processing
• Automated reconciliation❓Already exists, can GenAI make it better?
• Invoice and payments matching ✅
• Predictive analytics for cashflow forecasting ❓ Really? Will GenAI know future payment streams better than a human? I don’t think so!
4️⃣ Fraud Prevention
• Detection of irregular payment patterns ❓ Machine learning already does this so its unclear if GenAI will have an advantage
• Prevention of identity fraud ✅
• Improve efficiency of AML and sanctions screening and monitoring ❓Maybe this is a great application but where exactly are all of the corporate entity records to come from?
5️⃣ Operations
• Payment investigation ✅
• Service Level Agreement monitoring ✅
• Payment operations monitoring ✅
6️⃣ Regulatory Compliance
• ISO messaging (structuring data, e.g., addresses) ✅ Yes this is a big help!
• Scheme rules tracking and interpretation ✅
• Implementation recommendations
• Contract review for legal and compliance ❓ To a point. How big a contract?
• Compliance assessment ✅
7️⃣ Product Development and Technology
• Generation of personas, user stories and tasks ✅
• Code generation and analysis ✅ Yes GenAI is already used for this purpose
• AI-assisted prototyping ✅
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