Banks and corporates recognise role of AI in addressing inefficiencies in payment processing

92 percent of survey respondents think the industry needs a better understanding of how AI technologies can apply to transaction banking

LONDON - MONDAY 26 SEPTEMBER 2016 - Pelican, a leading provider of solutions to the financial services sector, today released the findings of its global survey ‘Leveraging artificial intelligence for payments efficiency’, which explores the attitudes of senior payment professionals within banks and corporates towards the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in supporting the payments business and related processes.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 reasoning 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.”


About Pelican
Pelican provides banks and corporates with solutions that enhance, streamline and secure the payments life-cycle. With over twenty years of expertise in the practical application of Artificial Intelligence technology to payments and financial crime compliance, Pelican partners with its customers to deliver innovative and agile solutions and drive growth. To date, Pelican has enabled outstanding efficiency benefits and increased speed to market for customers in over 55 countries, processing more than one billion transactions worth over US$5 trillion. Pelican is a global company with offices in New York, London, Amsterdam, Dubai, Mumbai and Hong Kong.  


Media enquiries:
Rich Went
Account Manager
Metia Group
+44 (0) 20 3100 3580
Rich.Went@Metia.com