Payments is full of “after-the-fact” reporting, but we want a world where the system warns you before the damage is done. I’m joined by Ankita Chowdhry, AI Product Lead at Payabli, to break down where AI is genuinely making a difference in payments right now and where it’s still mostly experimentation. We get specific about risk queues, underwriting reviews, compliance workflows, and why modern reasoning models can reduce manual work without sacrificing safety.
We also dig into what embedded finance changes for vertical SaaS platforms. When you combine financial data with operational data, you can move beyond simple scoring and start adding context: what the business actually does, how customers behave, and what patterns usually lead to disputes or stalled activation. Ankita shares how that opens the door to proactive payments operations, like detecting elevated chargeback risk early and recommending actions before a merchant gets into trouble.
Then we tackle the practical questions builders are asking in 2026: what AI should you build vs buy, what makes production AI harder than a demo, and why Payabli is embedding AI directly into payments infrastructure instead of treating it like a separate tool. If you’re building embedded payments, embedded finance, or a vertical SaaS platform, this is a roadmap for what to automate first and how to do it responsibly.
