VIDEO | Increasing digitalisation and leveraging new technologies - Trade Treasury Payments

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VIDEO | Increasing digitalisation and leveraging new technologies

At the BAFT (Bankers Association for Finance and Trade) General Annual Meeting in Washington, DC, Trade Treasury Payments (TTP) spoke with Ather Williams III, Head of Strategy, Digital, Innovation & Enterprise Payments at Wells Fargo.

Williams III said, “The strange thing about the payments market in the US is that we ask you to figure out how you want to pay. When you think about business-to-business payments in particular, we ask you to pick a rail and send us a file format for ACH versus same-day ACH versus wire transfers versus card payment. We’re finding that we can leverage some of the new technologies to optimise payments on behalf of our clients.”

Artificial intelligence, especially in its current form, is proving useful as a tool to help with business payments. AI is able to make decisions on behalf of the sender, optimising for liquidity, currency, and timing, without requiring someone to manually choose between a wire, an ACH, or a cheque. 

Williams III said, “If you say who you want to pay, the amount, the currency, and the destination, then optimising that payment is the kind of thing that artificial intelligence is built for. And you don’t need the next generation of agentic AI or large language model because you can use core machine learning and do that.”

Of course, technology alone cannot carry change forward. It takes people.

Williams III said, “Innovation starts with people. The technologies are constantly changing. Two years ago, it was large language models. Three years before that, it was machine learning models. Now it’s agentic AI systems. That is going to continue to evolve at a very rapid pace. What will be more important is getting the people in the industry involved; The subject matter experts who understand the problems to be solved and where we can apply technology. How do we keep them abreast of the technology so it can enable them to do their jobs better?”