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Insights and Expertise

Payments is looking for AI

value in the wrong place

Payments is overlooking its biggest AI opportunity

Global fintech revenues reached $504 billion in 2025. Ev-
ery one of those transactions carries post-transaction risk.
Chargebacks, friendly fraud and disputed transactions do
not disappear because the front-end experience is seam-
less.
In many cases, complexity increases as transaction vol-
umes grow and new payment models emerge.

The question merchants should be asking is not simply
how to accelerate growth. It is whether they have the in-
sight needed to protect the revenue they generate. Most
cannot answer that question confidently.
The majority of merchants operating at scale today lack
the internal capability to independently analyze dispute
activity in any meaningful way. They can see that disputes
are occurring. What they struggle to understand is why
By Monica Eaton those disputes are happening, where risk is concentrating,
Chargebacks911 which trends are accelerating and how operational perfor-
mance is changing over time.
he payments industry has largely settled on a
single AI narrative. The future belongs to the They are generating enormous transaction volumes with
intelligent assistant, the personalized recom- limited visibility into the factors driving revenue loss.
T mendation, the frictionless checkout, and the That is an intelligence gap, and it is precisely the type of
agent that completes a purchase before the consumer challenge AI is already solving elsewhere across financial
has finished forming the thought. Customer-facing AI is services.
where the investment is going, where the narratives are
loudest and where every major platform is racing to plant The operational visibility gap
its flag. The report highlights where AI is creating measurable val-
ue today: compliance workflows, fraud operations, under-
But the industry is looking in the wrong direction. The writing, engineering productivity and other operationally
FT Partners & BCG: Global FinTech Report 2026 - From intensive functions. Dispute management belongs firmly
Recovery to Resurgence (see https://tinyurl.com/yc66cffj) is in that category. Yet it remains largely absent from the in-
one of the most closely read reports in financial servic- dustry's AI conversation.
es, and it contains an observation that many people have
overlooked.
The dispute lifecycle is full of repetitive, pattern-depen-
dent and evidence-intensive work that is difficult to man-
AI's strongest near-term gains are concentrated in opera- age effectively through manual processes alone.
tional and workflow-heavy domains, not fully autono-
mous consumer experiences. The firms seeing the most
measurable value from AI are redesigning how internal
work gets done: compressing cycle times, reducing manu-
al workloads and generating real-time insight at a scale no
human team can replicate. “The customer-facing
revolution may be coming,
The customer-facing revolution may be coming, but the
operational revolution is already here. but the operational revolution
is already here.”

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