The survey of more than 120 payments professionals across 32 countries found that:
• 92 percent of respondents think the industry needs to gain a better understanding of how AI technologies apply in payments - as opposed to the hype around AI in consumer tech;
• 72 percent see strong potential for AI to tackle the many inefficiencies present in their payments processing activities;
• 67 percent believe that the adoption of AI technologies by banks to improve efficiencies in payments will increase significantly in the next two years.

When asked about the business areas that could potentially see the most significant benefits from AI if a solution were able to learn and improve its actions based on previous experience and patterns of behaviour, 63 percent cited the area of sanctions screening, AML and fraud prevention.

The areas of customer retention, message repair and exception handling, payment reconciliation, and payment validation and authorisation also scored highly. In terms of the shortcomings of existing technology used in payments operations, 65 percent noted that payments routing was the area with most inefficiencies.

Parth Desai, Founder and CEO of Pelican, said: “We hope this survey serves as a wake-up call to an industry still relying heavily on manual processes and legacy systems. The need to adopt smarter tools has never been more vital. By using the latest cutting edge AI technology, financial services providers can innovate and significantly reduce time to market. At the same time, they can introduce context and human-like understanding to their payments and compliance processes. This reduces the need for manual intervention, allowing for precious resources to be re-deployed.”

The company is releasing the results of the survey alongside a new discussion paper looking at the value of Intelligent Payments Management (IPM). The report examines the potential of AI, its impact in the financial world and questions why financial services firms and corporates have been slow in adopting this capability.

Pelican enables IPM by combining the AI disciplines of natural language processing, knowledge-based systems and machine learning with a digital knowledge base of transaction banking and compliance issues that has been compiled over the past 20 years. This combination allows Pelican to profile payments with precision and apply intelligent, human-like logic to transactions.

Parth Desai concluded: “Not only is today’s bank customer used to getting results in an instant, they are also getting used to seeing AI in many aspects of their daily lives - whether it's online shopping to viewing TV. By adopting Intelligent Payments Management (IPM), banks and corporates will achieve outstanding levels of efficiency, reduce costs, lower risk and create new opportunities for increased profitability.”

The full paper is available here