AI Revolutionizes Payments, But Frauds Rise Alongside

AI Transforms Payments, Boosting Efficiency and Personalization

Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly reshaping the financial industry, offering unprecedented capabilities in efficiency, personalization, and problem-solving. Scott Frisby, Head of Strategy at Elavon, discussed the profound impact of AI on the payments sector during a recent appearance on Times Radio’s Finance Insider program. While AI presents powerful new tools for businesses to operate more effectively, Frisby also highlighted the significant risks posed by its misuse by fraudsters and bad actors.

Elavon’s AI Adoption: From Back Office to Front End

Elavon, a leader in payment solutions, began integrating AI into its operations in late 2024, with 2025 serving as a crucial pilot phase. The initial focus was on enhancing back-office functions to streamline processes, reduce costs, and improve staff efficiency. Key areas of AI deployment include onboarding, dispute resolution, and customer service.

“All of those AI um tools that we now have fully in production have all been done in order to make us operate more efficiently and to make our staff operate more efficiently,” Frisby explained. He noted that as a regulated business, ensuring the accuracy and reliability of AI models was paramount. This rigorous approach allowed Elavon to quickly learn and deploy AI solutions.

Looking ahead, Frisby anticipates a significant pivot towards AI in front-end applications. This includes empowering sales teams with real-time, customized information about products and pricing, enabling them to create highly tailored proposals for potential merchants and partners. This move promises to deliver more personalized and effective client interactions.

The Double-Edged Sword: AI’s Benefits and Risks

Frisby emphasized that AI’s power is a double-edged sword. “However useful a and powerful AI is for us, it’s equally powerful to fraudsters and it’s equally powerful to bad actors in in in the industry,” he stated. This duality necessitates a significant portion of creative energy being redirected towards developing robust security measures to protect the entire ecosystem.

Despite these risks, the benefits of AI in payments are substantial. The most significant positive impact, according to Frisby, is the ability to treat each merchant as an individual. Instead of offering generic industry-specific solutions, AI enables the creation of highly customized offerings based on a merchant’s past behavior, market demands, and specific needs.

“The biggest positive impact of course is that it is as I uh referenced before it gives us the ability to treat merchants like a segment of one. So instead of saying this is our hospitality offering or this is our retail offering, we can give anyone merchant or partner a very very highly customized offering very quickly at low cost and with high accuracy…”

This level of personalization is expected to become the norm, leading to more relevant and effective commercial relationships.

Payments: The Lifeblood of Business

Frisby also shed light on the fundamental role of payments in business operations. While often perceived as a simple utility, he described payments as the “lifeblood of any business.” When payment systems function seamlessly, merchants are assured of timely transaction completion and fund receipt. For consumers, a successful payment transaction signifies the guaranteed acquisition of goods or services.

The payment experience, he argued, should be the “cherry on top” of the overall customer journey, ensuring a positive conclusion to the shopping experience. This contrasts with historical challenges where reconciling transactions with bank deposits could be a laborious and fragmented process, especially for smaller businesses relying on manual reconciliation.

Simplifying the Payment Stack: Innovation Meets Efficiency

The modern business landscape presents a challenge for merchants seeking to balance innovation and efficiency without overcomplicating their payment infrastructure. Historically, businesses managed separate domains for commerce, shopping, and payments. The current need to upgrade offerings across these areas can be daunting.

Frisby advised merchants to carefully evaluate potential and existing payment partners. Key considerations include a partner’s track record in payments, customer satisfaction levels, and their demonstrated ability to expand services beyond core payment processing into areas like commerce software. Elavon, he noted, has successfully transitioned from being purely a payments specialist to offering integrated commerce solutions, providing merchants with a unified platform to manage inventory, payments, staffing, and more.

“Looking for providers who’ve been able to execute that for others in the past is is the first port of call,” Frisby recommended for businesses aiming to avoid being overwhelmed by their payment stack.

Actionable Advice for the Future: Tackling the Unsolvable with AI

As a parting piece of advice for listeners looking towards 2026, Frisby urged businesses to adopt a proactive approach to AI, inspired by Elavon’s own internal exercise. He recommended identifying the company’s most intractable problems – those that have resisted solutions despite significant effort – and then exploring how AI can provide a pathway forward.

“AI gives you um this extra superpower of being able to solve the unsolvable or at least to come up with a plan of how it might be uh attacked,” Frisby concluded. This strategic application of AI can unlock new possibilities and drive innovation in overcoming long-standing business challenges.

The conversation, hosted by Times Radio in partnership with Elavon, underscored the transformative potential of AI in finance, emphasizing both the opportunities for growth and the critical need for vigilance against evolving threats.

Source: Elavon's Head of Strategy Scott Frisby Explains The Wonders And Dangers of AI | Finance Insider (YouTube)