Volante Technologies: The Critical Role of AI in Payments

In a discussion on the role of AI in the financial sector, Deepak Gupta from Volante Technologies, Gretchen Rodríguez from TD, Margaret Mayer from Zions Bancorporation and Shruti Patel from U.S. Bank who made it clear that AI is viewed as an end-to-end value proposition, and goes far beyond just fraud prevention.

Volante Technologies is leveraging AI in two main ways: internally and for their customers. Internally, Gupta noted the focus is on building new payments functionality, new rails and payment types, that are better, faster, and cheaper. This involves automating existing processes to deliver value to customers more quickly. For the banks they serve, the goal is to improve quality and reduce the cost of operations. As a practical example, Volante described using AI to auto-enrich incoming payments that are missing required data. Currently, such payments are rejected, leading to lost time and costs for the bank and an unhappy customer.

Volante’s AI solution will identify missing fields and suggest automatic enrichment to prevent rejection, ultimately improving productivity and speeding up payment processing. Looking ahead, Volante plans to deploy autonomous and semi-autonomous agents that will run in the background, intervening when a payment fails to process and suggesting the next steps, which minimizes human intervention. Gupta added that they also want to use AI for end-to-end monitoring of payments, infrastructure, scalability, and response time.

Rodríguez agreed that banks are utilizing AI for many different use cases, starting with the most obvious: customer service via bots and user interactions. However, she expressed particular interest in the evolution toward “AIgentic” payments, where transactions happen solely involving agents. This shift raises crucial compliance questions, specifically around how “Know Your Customer” (KYC) will be applied to these new agents. Beyond this revolution in automated payments, she noted that traditional AI use cases continue, such as leveraging large data lakes to better segment clients or to determine credit limits based on a client’s trajectory rather than just their tenure.

From a banking institution’s perspective, Shruti Patel from U.S. Bank emphasized the deliberate approach required when deploying AI tools, given that banks are highly regulated and manage confidential data for millions of customers. She stressed the need for AI adoption to be built upon pillars of transparency and explainability, ensuring the tools are fair, remove bias, avoid social harm, and drive social benefit.

U.S. Bank is focusing on applying AI to customer operations, helping customer service look at data transcription and quickly access the knowledge base. They are also using their merchant acquiring solution to give personalized recommendations to small businesses, making the customer journey frictionless through smart assistance, chatbots, and product recommendations. Furthermore, U.S. Bank is focused internally on leveraging AI to make their bankers’ lives easier, assisting them in giving the right product at the point of sale in a branch.

Furthermore, Margaret Mayer from Zions Bancorporation concluded the discussion by highlighting the huge role of AI in fraud prevention and noted that AI is crucial for safe money movement.