- Key insight: Agentic AI is automating repetitive back-end payment operations for banks and credit unions.
- Expert quote: Human oversight remains essential amid regulatory scrutiny, according to Cornerstone Advisors' Tony Desanctis.
- Forward look: Prepare for gradual agentic AI deployment that reallocates back-office FTEs, not full automation.
Bullet points generated by AI with editorial review
As financial institutions are looking for ways to use AI agents to improve their technology and processing, the Charlotte, North Carolina-based fintech Finzly has introduced agentic AI to its back-end payment processing offerings.
Finzly, a payments core provider for credit unions and banks and one of the first payments tech providers to connect to
Finzly CEO
"Banks deal with a lot of manual, very repetitive processes," Rengachari said. "When you have someone do the same thing again and again a thousand times a day, the person can make mistakes or overlook something."
Rengachari pointed to legally-required
"Before you send a payment, regulations require the bank to screen the payment against the prohibited named list," he said. "Ninety-eight percent of the screening results are false positives. If you train an [AI] agent who knows how to make those decisions, it can cut down on false positives."
Rengachari said that Finzly's AI agents are meant to be added on to a financial institution's existing tech stack like "a Lego block," similar to how Finzly's other offerings fit into a bank's current core technology. "Our products run parallel to the legacy system, as you cannot rip and replace in a short period of time," he said.
Finzly has built its agentic AI tools with a human-in-the-loop governance model for compliance purposes, according to the company. Cornerstone Advisors senior director Tony Desanctis told American Banker that at the current stage of AI technology, human oversight is still necessary for banks due to the level of regulatory scrutiny they are under.
"The current iterations of agentic AI-type solutions are a step of progress to automating portions of existing processes," Desanctis said. "What Finzly is doing is the right-stepped approach just based on the fact that their clients probably aren't going to adapt a completely automated agent at this point."
EMARKETER banking analyst Myra Thomas told American Banker that applying AI agents on the back end could give banks the ability to redirect their employees to other tasks, even if the human-in-the-loop governance model means that the agentic AI task isn't fully automated.
"The fact that this is cloud-based and will fit right into all the legacy systems and the spaghetti technology that exists at banks is pretty interesting as well," she said.
Desanctis noted that Finzly's customer base, which includes smaller banks and credit unions, could be more likely to adapt third-party offerings due to not always having the in-house resources to build such tools themselves.
"I think they're more inclined to adopt them, assuming that the cost structure is such that it justifies, 'If I automate these nine steps of this 14-step process, that's at least half of a full-time equivalent that I can reallocate to other work,'" he said.
Thomas said that whenever a new technology is introduced to a firm there is the challenge of training employees on how to properly use it, especially if it still requires humans to be a part of the process in some way.
"With all these rollouts of agentic AI and all sorts of AI across organizations, even with big banks where you have all these really smart, savvy people, there's still an issue of upskilling that comes along with it," she said.
Finzly has signed deals with
Desanctis noted that Finzly's focus on bringing agentic AI into legacy payment processing is positioning the fintech against the rise of
"It's going to be relevant for as long as those payment methods exist, which I don't think is going to go away anytime soon," he said. "Betty in the back office has been doing ACH for 37 years, she's not going to do agentic payments through ChatGPT. That curve is way longer than anybody anticipates when it comes to technology."
Desanctis said that making legacy payment processing less manual for banks can slow down the curve of obsolescence and helps Finzly itself stay relevant in the payments space.
"For Finzly, who lives and dies in that space, they don't want it to go away," he said. "They don't know if they're going to be able to win on agentic payments at the consumer level, so they need to make sure that their existing processes are as efficient and automated as possible."
