INTERVIEW | Marius Galdikas: The growing role of artificial intelligence in the digital payments market

AI-enabled facial recognition

The pandemic gave precedence to AI-driven facial recognition solutions. A group of restaurants and retailers in California combined the need for stemming the spread of Covid-19, and the task of handling payments securely.

The effort resulted in a face-powered payment confirmation system, or PopID.

According to Marius Galdikas, the pay-by-face idea bears great potential as it requires a lot less engagement from the customer’s perspective, which adds to its appeal.

“Such AI-powered payments decrease the required effort from the customer to the bare minimum,” Galdikas said.

“Eliminating the extra steps in the process—taking out the card, entering the required PIN—is likely to improve perceived shopping experience, as customers can focus on a grab-and-go approach and save time. This leaves very little room for hassle, which, in fact, may lead to increased shopping cart values too.”

Interruption-free transactions

While conducting a digital payment transaction, users want one thing above all else - a smooth, glitch-free experience, as unexpected lags are too much of a disruption for the modern-day customer.

VISA has already attempted to bridge any possible outages by introducing a Smarter Stand-in Processing (Smarter STIP), which leverages deep learning to analyse past transactions before generating decisions to approve or decline transactions on behalf of issuers.

The prototype is set to be released in October, and the smart stand-in solution may push other players in the payment industry to also look for additional measures that could help limit the number of declined transactions.

“For merchants, a smooth payment process may be the single most important aspect in terms of retaining customers with the ever-decreasing attention span,” Galdikas said.

“Bypassing issues related to system glitches could help avoid costly failures for both PSPs and merchants. In addition, combining such solutions with AI enables to adopt a more dynamic approach and deal with similar situations in a timely manner, without any noticeable mishaps for the customers.”

Fraud-resilient settlements

The past few months reemphasized the importance of anti-fraud measures, as having more users switching to online shopping instead of brick-and-mortar businesses resulted in skyrocketing levels of scams.

The finance sector has already ramped up the cybersecurity spent to keep the fraudsters at bay.

AI can assist with recognizing patterns and exceptions, minimizing fraud for complex, high-volume transactions.

Human error is one of the more pronounced weaknesses, so using task-specific AI to recognise dubious transactions will have a significant impact on the overall fraud resistance of digital payment systems.

In addition, fraud prevention not only protects against the loss of funds but also saves businesses additional costs for legal settlements, which can add up to above $3 for each dollar lost to scammers.

“The circumstances surrounding Covid-19 and the growth of online fraud adds up to the stressors that urge both merchants and PSPs to deepen their search for novel security tools even more,” Galdikas said.

“Thus AI-driven solutions are highly likely to become a must-have among tools for ensuring transparency and reducing fraud.”

Without a doubt, the real impact of AI usage in the digital payments market will reveal itself over time.

That said, it seems a wider implementation of AI-driven integrations is inevitable, as it carries the promise of next-level actionable solutions that would sustain the growing demand for digital payments.