Fintech Perspectives

You know the feeling. You initiate a payment in an app and then wait. You watch the confirmation screen. You refresh. You check your email. You wonder if it went through. That uncertainty is a tiny anxiety spike.

When you think about AI in fintech, you probably think about fraud detection or lending decisions. Smart applications of machine learning to problems that humans solve slowly. But there's a frontier emerging that's more interesting: agentic payments.

There's a new term floating around fintech: payment orchestration. It sounds complicated. And depending on who you ask, it either is or isn't. Here's the unfiltered version: payment orchestration is the trend that solves the problem created by too many payment platforms.

Open banking was supposed to disrupt everything. Data access. Integration. Competitive dynamics. It did. But it wasn't the disruption anyone expected. Open banking opened up account data: balances, transactions, and identity. Third parties could read a customer's financial life.

Most fintech teams measure payment success by one metric: did the transaction go through? But there's a second metric that matters more: how fast does the money reach your account?

You've decided to implement instant payments. Good. You've recognized that 2-3 day ACH is a competitive liability. Now comes the hard part: figuring out which rail to use.

You've probably heard about RTP and FedNow. But there's another innovation in the real-time payments space that hardly anyone talks about: Request for Payment, or RfP. It's not flashy. It doesn't have the marketing hype of instant settlement. But for certain use cases, it's better.

If you've been building an embedded payments product, you've probably enjoyed a relatively straightforward relationship with your sponsor bank: you integrate, you build on their rails, they take a cut.