Recently, there has been a wave of AI payment craze in the global payment field. Major payment giants have collectively focused on the AI payment track and actively seized market opportunities.
Domestic payment giants such as WeChat Pay, Alipay, UnionPay Business, and JD.com have launched AI payment products and started testing.
On June 17, WeChat Pay officially released an AI exclusive card. Users can put forward consumption needs in a dialogue with the agent, and the AI completes the entire process from intelligent recommendation to order payment.
On June 16, Ant Group launched the AI version of Alipay “Abao”. With the help of an AI intelligent dialog box, users can directly access tens of thousands of services in one sentence, and the user interaction experience has also changed from “display style” to “conversational style”.
The AI payment products launched by UnionPay Business can be used in high-frequency scenarios such as cloud payment and AI ordering. Users only need to speak a natural language or text to give instructions to quickly complete the transaction and realize “pay as soon as you ask”.
International payment giants are not far behind.
Mastercard has launched the Agent Payment Service for Machines (AP4M), which provides a system to scale high-frequency, low-latency and small-amount payments executed by agents and machines, allowing all types of transactions to be authorized, coordinated and settled at machine-level speeds on its global payment network.
Visa has launched a series of technical frameworks around smart commerce. Its business leader said that AI is evolving from an information analysis and auxiliary decision-making tool to an “action subject” that can perform transactions on behalf of users. Smart commerce is gradually taking shape as a new business model.
Some analysts believe that behind the collective layout of AI payment by payment giants is the drastic change that AI agents are bringing to the business ecosystem.
The latest research report from cross-border payment company Worldpay shows that about 40% of consumers around the world are willing to let AI agents do their shopping for them, and nearly two-thirds of consumers in China are ready to let AI help them browse and purchase goods.
The AI-based transformation of the Internet platform is essentially the ecological card position of the payment giant in the era of intelligent agents.
By the end of May this year, the number of Alipay AI payments had exceeded 300 million, supporting 95% of general-purpose agent frameworks.
In early June, WeChat announced that it would provide WeChat mini program developers with the ability to access the WeChat AI ecosystem. Didi, JD.com, Meituan, Ctrip and other Internet platforms were among the first to access the ecosystem. Users can directly complete daily tasks such as hailing a taxi, ordering takeout, and hotel reservations by talking to the WeChat AI agent.
However, the deep integration of AI and payment not only improves efficiency, but also brings many challenges.
AI has unprecedentedly increased the transmission speed, scale of impact, and cross-border contagion of financial risks, posing new challenges to financial stability.
For example, in the era of intelligent agents, tens of thousands of machine nodes conduct linked transactions. Once a risk breaks out, the scope and volume of the impact are difficult to predict.
In addition, the industry also faces the risk of privacy leaks such as user information and asset data. It is difficult to define the responsible party after machine autonomous decision-making errors. Existing transaction contracts, legal agreements, and compliance frameworks cannot adapt to new scenarios and other practical problems.
Industry experts said that in the face of the general trend of AI reshaping finance, the industry urgently needs to establish a forward-looking regulatory framework, strengthen coordination between the government and the market, promote international regulatory coordination, and maintain the bottom line of preventing systemic risks while encouraging innovation.
In the process of training financial intelligence, values, culture, compliance and risk constraints must be embedded in advance.
