AI is racing into payments, but the uncomfortable truth is that speed without trust turns into risk fast. We sit down with Garima Chaudhary, VP of Financial Crime and Compliance AI at ThetaRay, to unpack what it really takes to modernize AML and sanctions compliance while keeping humans accountable for outcomes.
Garima shares her career journey from engineering and operational risk into the high-stakes world of financial crime, where “follow the money” reveals both how economies grow and how criminal networks adapt.
We get specific about why legacy rules-based transaction monitoring creates overwhelming false positives, and how behavioral AI can spot anomalies across customer segments and peer groups, improving detection without punishing legitimate people and small businesses with blunt, one-size-fits-all rules. Along the way, we talk about the human cost of financial crime and why compliance decisions can either protect vulnerable communities or unintentionally lock them out of the financial system.
The theme “the future is human” shows up everywhere: explainable AI, human-in-the-loop review, and the governance and documentation needed to defend decisions to auditors and regulators. Garima also looks ahead to agentic payments, where AI agents buy and move money on our behalf, forcing a rethink of identity, delegated authority, and what “normal behavior” even means in fraud and AML models.
If you care about fintech, payments innovation, and building compliant products that scale, this conversation will sharpen your thinking.
