While hype around AI has reduced from its peak in late 2024 and early 2025, that has not translated into reduced interest from the payments industry. Our analysis of the earnings calls of 25 cross-border payments-focused players shows that mentions of AI are significantly higher than a year ago, with agentic AI in particular seeing a surge in discussion.
We reviewed the earnings call transcripts of a basket of 25 publicly traded companies with a strong focus on cross-border payments between Q1 2021 and Q4 2025, to identify the frequency of mentions of AI or agentic AI. And despite AI having been taken over by stablecoins as the topic drawing the most hype in payments at present, it’s clear that the technology is still seeing significant focus.
Recent discussion of AI in payments earnings calls has varied somewhat, but has largely continued to focus on similar topics to those we have seen over the past year or so – namely, the use of the technology to improve customer service, as well as optimising processes and increasing efficiency within business operations. In the most recent earnings calls, Citi, for example, highlighted automated code reviews alongside using AI to resolve client inquiries faster, while Goldman Sachs framed AI as underpinning a wide-reaching re-engineering of company processes.
For many, AI has been a focus of increased financial investment, but there are also those seeing gains from the technology, with Corpay highlighting expected margin expansion from a number of AI-based productivity initiatives while Remitly highlighted a 21 basis point improvement in customer support and operations costs, aided by its AI-based virtual assistant. The company was also among those to highlight the technology’s continuing use to combat fraud.
However, the biggest focus of late has become agentic AI, a term that only began to appear in the second half of 2024 but which in the most recent calls saw more mentions than AI itself. Also referred to as virtual or autonomous assistants, this technology allows AI to independently execute complete processes, including in some cases initiating purchases and making payments.
As a result, it has seen interest split into two broad categories among cross-border payments players. The first is the use of such AI agents to improve in-house operations, which saw a small number of mentions over the last few quarters. However, the second is the development of products, protocols and features to make it easier for agentic tools to make payments, which has been responsible for the vast majority of the recent discussion.
Mastercard, Visa and PayPal have all developed solutions in this area that drove their discussion significantly, with both Mastercard and Visa announcing that they have begun to process agentic transactions on their networks in Q3, while PayPal announced its own agentic commerce services for merchants.
However, while much of the discussion of both agentic AI and the wider technology has become increasingly focused on tangible, fully launched initiatives, there are also those for whom the technology is more of a long-term project. Societe Generale, for example, described the technology as “critical” but stressed that ensuring quality and compliance meant implementing AI tools at scale “will be a process”, while Standard Chartered similarly indicated that the process was a long-term initiative.
AI is beginning to see results, but full delivery remains ahead, and we can expect to see more in 2026 as investors begin to expect greater returns from the technology.
