FTV has been backing payments companies for 27 years, ever since our investment in BlueGill Technologies in the late 1990s. We’ve watched the payments sector absorb wave after wave of technology: analog to digital, branch to mobile, batch to real-time rails and now AI.
Every wave reopens the same debate: who wins and who gets displaced?
In this video, FTV Partner Adam Hallquist shares which companies will win with AI in payments and why.
Full Video Transcript
Payments is already one of the most automated and AI rich industries in the world.
Fraud models, risk controls, network logic. In payments, every decision has to be explained.
Why was the transaction approved or declined?
Machine learning has been embedded in this stack for years. That’s why we think the AI winners in payments aren’t determined by who got there first.
They’re determined by who has the right structural advantages. Any AI use case that wins here has to make money movement safer, faster or cheaper.
If it doesn’t do one of those things, or even better, all three, doesn’t matter how clever the model is in the next one to two years.
The highest ROI applications are in fraud underwriting and compliance automation workflows — with billions of clean training events and a direct P&L impact.
The bigger opportunity is three to five years out: agentic commerce. A meaningful share of transactions won’t be initiated by humans. They’ll come from AI agents acting on behalf of consumers and businesses.
The infrastructure to authenticate the agent, verify its authority and settle with a full audit trail is being built right now. Whoever builds that really well captures enormous value.
