How real is artificial intelligence in the payments space? 

“It’s very real, and it’s only going to get much, much better,” said Kevin Miyamoto, Co-Founder and COO of Identifee, a platform that helps financial institutions enhance customer engagement while automating manual tasks. Identifee is also a Nacha Preferred Partner. 

While the payments industry is generally proceeding cautiously with AI, Miyamoto said the “next frontier of AI for banks and credit unions really is focused on agentic workflows,” in which human input is minimal as AI agents perform tasks. On Nacha’s Payments SmartCast podcast, Miyamoto used fraud as just one example. 

“Today you might have someone manually pulling reports, putting it in Power BI or Tableau or another tool, having to know what to query, sharing those reports over email, and then figuring out, ‘Hey, what do I actually do with this?’” said Miyamoto. 

“What’s really great about AI is that with a simple prompt that you can program to run at whatever frequency, you can say, ‘Hey, I want you to look at this dataset or this database and find anomalies,’” and then alert someone or perform an action. 

Mark Dixon, AAP, AFPP, APRP, CTP, NCP, Nacha Senior Consultant, said Nacha Consulting is doing more technology assessments in conjunction with the other reviews it performs for clients. What are they seeing? 

“A lot of organizations, especially in the financial services space, are in this analytical stage when it comes to AI. They’re starting to use the tools as they can in a more controlled environment and figuring out how can we actually expand that and use them more as we move into the future,” said Dixon. 

Miyamoto and Dixon will be among the panelists at the April 28 Smarter Faster Payments 2026 session “AI in Action: Unlocking the Future of Payments Operations.” On the podcast, both acknowledged what Dixon called “the people piece of it—because everyone always gets scared when we talk about AI and how it automates, and the functions it takes over.” But they believe humans will still have important, albeit different, roles. 

“The more we mature this, even when we look at it from a payments operational perspective, you’re freeing up resources to have them work on more complex aspects, and you’re leveraging their knowledge in a much more effective way,” said Dixon. 

Miyamoto agreed, saying, “The new kind of future role, I think, is going to be people who work side by side with agents and become almost like a taskmaster, if you will.” 

Much more was discussed, and you can listen to the complete podcast below. 

For details on Smarter Faster Payments 2026, April 26-29 in San Diego, visit the conference website.