AI in Fintech & Payments
AI in payments is moving from demos to production. These posts cover use-case identification, value modeling (ROI / feasibility / data readiness), RAG architectures for merchant support, auto-escalation bots, AI fraud detection and the regulatory frame in which all of it has to ship.
Case studies
Automated merchant onboarding pipeline, KYC/KYB, UBO discovery, sanctions and PEP screening, risk-tiered decisioning with full audit trail. Activation cut from weeks to hours; manual review load down 70%.
Led a $3M programme launching Pakistan's first licensed OTT platform, 5 tech workstreams (iOS, Android, web, CMS, CDN), 25-person team, 8 international vendors, PMBOK + Agile hybrid governance.
Identified, value-modeled and deployed 4 production GenAI solutions across merchant integration support, incident auto-escalation, partner support automation, and a fraud/AML AI pilot with a major banking partner.
Essays · 13
SWIFT and Cryptocurrency: The Honest Take
Stablecoins solve a real cross-border problem in specific corridors. They do not solve every cross-border problem in every corridor.
SWIFT vs Card Rails vs Local Wallets: When to Use What
There is no universal best rail. There is the best rail for this corridor, this amount, this customer, this use case.
KYB Automation Without Blowing Up Risk
Automated KYB is not about removing humans. It is about putting them where they actually add risk-adjusted value.
Where ML Beats AI: Six Payment Problems an LLM Cannot Touch
There is a quiet AI-in-fintech mistake teams keep making: reaching for an LLM the moment the word 'AI' shows up on the roadmap. Sometimes the right answer is a gradient-boosted tree and a clean feature pipeline. This is the operator's argument for the boring choice.
Where PMOs Fail: Six Patterns I've Watched in Fintech Programmes
PMOs don't fail because the PMs are bad. They fail because the function gets miscast as governance theatre instead of decision-making infrastructure. Six failure shapes, the symptoms, the fix.
Virtual Card Accounts (VCA): The Quiet Backbone of B2B, Travel and Marketplace Payments
VCAs look like a card primitive. They are actually a control primitive. The product job is to decide which controls travel with the number, and which sit in the platform.
Open Banking Product Architecture: Aggregator vs Direct, AISP vs PISP, and Where the Value Actually Lives
Open banking is not a data product. It is a workflow product that happens to use bank data as its raw material. Teams that miss this build pretty dashboards and weak businesses.
GenAI in Fintech: 4 Production Use Cases That Actually Ship
Most fintech AI work in 2026 is still demos. These four use cases are not, they're running in production at $1B+ TPV across five regulated markets.
RAG for Merchant Integration Support: A Production Playbook
RAG is the right starting architecture for merchant integration support, but only if the corpus is curated, the citations are mandatory and the fallback paths are designed before launch.
AI-Powered Auto-Escalation: Cutting Payment Incident MTTR by 70%
The first 15 minutes of any payment incident is reconstruction work. An AI auto-escalation bot does that reconstruction in seconds, and your incident commander walks in with the diagnostic already done.
Value-Modeling GenAI Use Cases in Fintech: ROI, Feasibility, Data Readiness, Regulatory Risk
Most fintech AI roadmaps fail because they prioritise ambition over data readiness and regulatory risk. This is the four-axis framework that ships.
AI Fraud Detection vs Rule Engines: A Field Comparison
AI fraud detection beats rule engines on novel-attack detection. Rule engines beat AI on explainability and ops cost. The right answer is almost always a hybrid, and the design of the hybrid is the actual work.
RAID Logs, SteerCo and the PMO Stack That Actually Ships at $1B+ Scale
Most PMO failure modes come from registers without owners, SteerCos without decisions, and OKRs without consequences. Fix the stack, fix the delivery.