Agentic AI Emerges as Fix for Cross-Border Payment Frictions
Agentic artificial intelligence (AI) is being utilized to enhance operational efficiencies and customer experiences within enterprises. This technology is being applied in areas such as loan underwriting and fraud detection, and is now expanding globally. Ram Sundaram, Co-Founder and COO of TerraPay, highlighted the benefits of agentic AI in addressing cross-border payment challenges. The use of agentic AI is seen as a solution to improve cross-border payment processes and reduce frictions. Sundaram discussed the potential impact of this AI technology on the future of payments in a recent interview.
Agentic artificial intelligence (AI) promises to improve operational efficiencies and the customer experience offered by enterprises. The advanced technology is finding applications in loan underwriting and fraud detection, and now it’s moving across borders.
TerraPay Co-Founder on AI in Global Money Movement
TerraPay Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer Ram Sundaram told PYMNTS as part of the “What’s Next in Payments” series focused on exploring AI’s use in banking and by FinTechs that automated decision making and streamlined processes will continue to transform global money movement, especially as faster payments gain ground in cross-border transactions. That’s the inexorable trend, but as Sundaram put it, there’s still room, and a necessity, to have some human interaction in the mix.
In terms of global fund flows, TerraPay’s single connection ties more than 3.7 billion mobile wallets together across 200 sending and 144 receiving countries, touching 7.5 billion bank accounts. As one might imagine, coordinating and enabling the transactions is complex.
“Obviously, in the best-case scenario, everything goes smoothly, but when things are not going smoothly, that’s when the customer queries come in,” Sundaram said. It’s no easy task to find out straight away where a transaction is, as analysts and representatives at the company have to look at logs and query partner systems.
“A lot of that work is done manually,” said Sundaram, who added that the agents “know the corridors and the markets that they are working in, but it still takes some time.”
Using AI Models at TerraPay
TerraPay is using AI models with machine learning to bolster customer support and automate tasks as financial institutions (TerraPay’s client base) send payments in real time, and those payments are processed into local markets’ beneficiary banks.
“We still don’t trust [AI models] to let them respond to the customer straight away, but we can do the analysis, and then that gets reviewed by an agent who decides if [information] is accurate or not and then sends it off,” Sundaram said.
The same principles are guiding AI models and company practices to improve technical and security operations, analyzing and categorizing anomalous transactions and automating integrations with partner firms.
“Compliance is an issue where there is a lot of review needed of the alerts, and we are using [AI models] to speed up those processes,” Sundaram said.
Challenges and Future of Agentic AI
Asked about how agentic AI can be harnessed, Sundaram emphasized the importance of ensuring technology reliability in financial services. Agentic AI remains pricey, but industry expectations are that prices will decrease as the technology becomes more ubiquitous.
Data quality is crucial for AI models to function effectively. Sundaram stressed the need for clean and accessible data that can be synthesized by the models. He highlighted the importance of breaking down intra-company data silos and structuring data for optimal use.
AI models and agentic AI are seen as tools to enhance efficiency and scalability at TerraPay. Sundaram underlined the significance of these technologies in building a secure, fast, and cost-effective transaction processing system.
Agentic AI is emerging as a solution for cross-border payment frictions, offering potential benefits for businesses and customers alike.