AI and the Future of Payments Policy
IMF News, September 28, 2026
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- Published: September 28, 2026
I. What AI can do for payments
- AI can reduce information frictions and switching costs by continuously assessing fees, services, exchange rates and execution quality and routing each transaction to the most efficient provider, increasing competition and pressuring incumbents to improve prices and services.
- Agentic systems can automate complex transactions that currently require extensive human involvement by interpreting context and operating without explicit new instructions for each transaction, increasing the volume and speed of transactions.
- AI can automate the mechanics of paying, coordinate machine-to-machine payments, and optimize timing based on liquidity, costs, and contractual obligations—going beyond current programmability that requires explicit instructions and predefined parameters.
- Agentic AI could substantially lower the costs of regulatory reporting and compliance by automating collection, reconciliation and reporting of data across institutions and jurisdictions, continuously monitoring transactions and positions against regulatory requirements and producing compliance documentation in real time.
- In cross-border payments, AI agents could automate customer due diligence and sanctions screening, improving speed and consistency of compliance; agent-enabled price comparison may yield larger benefits in the cross-border context than domestically.
- Key statistic: IMF staff estimate that cross-border payments move nearly $1 quadrillion a year; at that scale, improvements measured in basis points can translate into very large gains.
- Short-run emphasis: Many benefits can be delivered by upgrading existing core payment systems rather than by fully reimagining the financial system; this is where tangible benefits from AI are most likely to appear first.
II. How the financial system might evolve
- The financial system must become more digital, more interoperable and more programmable to support AI agents as a significant part of economic activity.
- Tokenization is highlighted as especially promising because tokenized assets are natively programmable and can settle almost instantly, at any hour.
- Examples of ongoing initiatives:
- CHIPS is leading a multi‑bank initiative to create a shared tokenized deposit settlement platform.
- The ECB's recently launched Project Pontes is designed to enable wholesale transactions on distributed ledger platforms to settle in central bank money.
- The Bank of England is requiring certain issuers of stablecoins to hold central bank deposits.
- Legal and regulatory priorities:
- Establish the legal nature of tokens, including rights and claims of purported owners and parties with varying degrees of contractual privity.
- Define the relationship between tokenized assets and their real-world equivalents.
- Avoid unnecessary obstacles to interoperability across networks.
- Update liquidity frameworks because atomic settlement reduces counterparty risk but raises intraday liquidity needs by requiring prefunding.
- Stablecoins considerations:
- To maintain stable value and function as a payment instrument, stablecoins need to be backed by safe and liquid assets like short-term government obligations, central bank deposits, or insured commercial bank deposits that are ultimately supported by central bank money.
- Central bank responses and public infrastructure:
- Debates include whether central banks should offer new forms of central bank money (such as tokenized reserves) and whether they should extend access to central bank money to new parties; finance ministries might consider issuing government obligations in tokenized form.
- It is appropriate for central banks to provide new public infrastructure that supports competition, such as tokenized reserves, but such services should not lock out new technologies and business models.
- Policy objective: Create an enabling environment that ensures integrity and stability while preserving space for competition to promote heterogeneity in business models as a source of resilience.
- IMF role: The IMF supports central banks in evaluating alternative pathways through technical assistance and facilitates international dialogue as markets and technologies evolve.
III. Approaching AI risk
- AI introduces cyber risks by accelerating the speed, frequency, and breadth of vulnerability discovery and potential exploitation; tokenized markets rely on shared, complex infrastructure and a small number of third-party providers, so a cyber incident can propagate widely and potentially become systemic.
- To date, there has not been a macro-critical cyber event; private risk management and the existing supervisory architecture have contained risks.
- Continued and enhanced risk management measures:
- Strong governance.
- Technical controls that limit the blast radius of a breach.
- Robust incident response and recovery.
- Greater coordination among standard setters, supervisory networks, governments and industry.
- Emergent regulatory considerations:
- Defenders may need frontier AI tools as cyber actors deploy similar tools.
- Debate exists about whether increasingly powerful AI systems could pose risks requiring new regulation to slow development.
- IMF focus on regulation and systemic risk:
- Apply a macro-financial lens to identify where market failures may arise, where risks can become systemic or macro-critical, and where private incentives diverge from the public interest.
- Potential market failures include major externalities from defective products, information gaps between developers, users, and regulators, operational dependencies on a small number of providers, and loss of competitiveness or concentration of market power from poorly designed regulation.
- Policy approach: Identify demonstrable market failures; evaluate whether existing regulatory frameworks suffice; if new interventions are needed, ensure they are proportionate, targeted, internationally coordinated, and designed to avoid discouraging competition and innovation.
Conclusion
- AI could be transformative for the payments system; handled well, it can make payments more efficient, more competitive, and better suited to the future economy.
- Policymakers must enable transformation while safeguarding against risks; the IMF supports members in assessing spillovers and vulnerabilities and facilitates the international dialogue needed for an open and stable payments system consistent with the IMF's 80-year mandate to ensure the stability of the international monetary and financial system.