Practical AI for smarter payment exception handling

 

• Design-time intelligence vs. runtime automation: How can financial institutions leverage upfront tooling to reduce exceptions before they happen or are noticed, especially as payments grow in volume and become more real-time? 
• Balancing innovation with regulation: Banks can’t afford risky processes in exception handling, reconciliation, and triage. What are financial institutions proven strategies for deploying AI without adding risk to their clients’ working capital? 
• Learning from the pioneers: Discover real-world lessons from teams already seeing impact by embedding AI into their design and decision-making processes. 
• Knowing where each AI solution fits: Traditional deterministic processes excel at structured payment and exception handling. Where can generative and agentic AI supercharge human interventions and human reviews without overstepping their limitations? 

Payments keep the business world running. JP Morgan finds that global payment flows reached $195 trillion in 2024 and are expected to reach $320 trillion by 2032, with most value coming from demanding B2B clients. These corporations drove the shift to faster payments, and now they’re quick to switch banks in search of superior client servicing if even 1% of transactions hit snags that take weeks to resolve while the other 99% complete in moments. 

As organisations progress their ISO 20022 transitions and payment volumes continue to surge, investigation and exception handling becomes imperative to improve. But here’s the challenge: How can financial institutions effectively increase automation and apply AI to a process as sensitive as exception handling, where their clients’ working capital is already at risk and they face such robust regulatory scrutiny? 

Leading institutions are demonstrating that design-time intelligence can resolve up to 90% of exceptions through predictable, deterministic, workflow-based strategies, while strategically applying AI to influence the remaining 10%. These same institutions have discovered both the limitations and the secure applications of generative and agentic AI to supercharge their teams. 

With ISO 20022, CBDCs, digital currencies, and blockchain looming on the horizon, finetuning your payment exception handling, investigation, reconciliation, and triage isn’t optional — it’s essential for 2026 and beyond. 

Register for this Finextra webinar, hosted in association with Pega, to join our panel of industry experts who will discuss the impact of design-time tooling on exception handling and explore practical lessons for embedding AI into design and decision-making processes.