AI and the Future of Payments Policy

Thank you, Graeme, and thank you SWIFT for the kind invitation.

The theme of this year’s conference is digital finance for AI-driven economies.  This is an important topic for the IMF because an efficient and secure payments system is critical to economic growth and stability.

Clearly, as the theme suggests, the financial system, and payments in particular, will need to evolve. If AI is used as widely as proponents expect, a great deal of economic activity will be undertaken by AI agents rather than by people. The current payments system was not built for autonomous agents operating continuously and at scale.

At the same time, AI has extraordinary potential to transform the payments system we already have, even before we get to the more difficult questions about how the financial system itself may need to evolve. 

Today, I want to explore three points: first, how AI can improve the payments system; second, whether and how the financial system needs to be reengineered to support an AI-intensive world; and third, how policymakers should respond to certain risks that are unique to AI. 

I. What AI can do for payments

Let me start with how AI can improve the payments landscape.

One way is by reducing information frictions and switching costs.  AI agents can assess fees, services, exchange rates and execution quality continuously, routing each transaction to the most efficient provider. That lowers barriers to entry, increases competition and puts pressure on incumbents to improve their prices and services.  This applies not just to financial services, but to all forms of commerce.  One might even wonder whether a sustained reduction in information frictions and switching costs could have macroeconomically significant consequences for inflation. 

Second, agents can automate complex transactions that today require extensive human involvement.  They can manage the mechanics of paying, coordinating machine-to-machine payments and optimizing the timing based on liquidity, costs, and contractual obligations. Some of this is possible today through programmability. But programmability only takes you so far. It requires explicit instructions for each task and operates within predefined parameters. By contrast, agentic systems can interpret context and operate without requiring a new set of instructions for each transaction. That would open up more commerce to automation, increasing the volume and speed of transactions.

Third, agentic AI could substantially lower the costs of regulatory reporting and compliance by automating the collection, reconciliation and reporting of data across institutions and jurisdictions. Agents could continuously monitor transactions and positions against regulatory requirements, identify gaps in real time, and produce compliance documentation.

The benefits of AI become even more powerful in the context of cross-border payments, which bridge different legal systems, currencies and regulatory requirements.  Agents could automate activities such as customer due diligence and sanctions screening, improving the speed and consistency of compliance. And the benefits from agent-enabled price comparison are likely to be even larger than in the domestic context, given the incremental frictions faced by retail consumers making cross-border payments. 

I would not underestimate the scale of the benefits of applying AI to the existing payments architecture. Payments are about much more than just the public infrastructure that supports them.  A full payments product requires regulatory compliance, dispute resolution, and customer support.  Those functions are needed regardless of whether payments run on blockchain rails or other infrastructures.

Many of the benefits promised by a reimagined financial system can instead be delivered by upgrading the core payment systems that we already have. That is where AI can help.  In the short run, this is where we are likely to see more tangible benefits. 

The scale alone makes the case for investment. IMF staff estimate that cross-border payments move nearly $1 quadrillion a year. At that scale, even improvements measured in basis points can translate into very large gains.

read more: https://www.imf.org/en/news/articles/2026/09/28/sp092826-ai-and-the-future-of-payments-policy