The Green Sheet Online Edition
August 8, 2025 • 25:08:01
GS Advisory Board
AI in action: What's working in payments and why
Artificial intelligence is rapidly reshaping the payments landscape—but how are those in the trenches actually using it, and what results are they seeing? To gain insight into how AI is affecting our industry today and how it might shape its future, we posed three questions to members of our advisory board. Their thoughtful, experience-based responses offer a window into both the practical uses and strategic considerations of AI adoption across different business models.
We extend our sincere thanks to Allen Kopelman of Nationwide Payment Systems, Rod Hometh of RPY Innovations, and Steven Feldshuh of Betterpay Group for sharing their perspectives. Below are the questions we asked, followed by their responses:
- Have you implemented AI in your business? If so, what have you learned—successes, challenges or unexpected outcomes?
- In your view, how is the broader payments and fintech ecosystem leveraging AI effectively today? Are there any high-profile efforts that haven’t lived up to expectations?
- Looking ahead, how do you see your business, and the industry at large, evolving with AI in the mix? Please share any specific trends, innovations or concerns you anticipate.
Allen Kopelman, Nationwide Payment Systems
1. AI implementation at Nationwide Payment Systems
We are using AI for a variety of things, and some of our vendors use AI as well. In the office, we use AI to help with SEO, blogging, putting together social media posts, writing emails and more. Using AI can cut the time it takes to do some tasks by minutes or hours. It is super helpful to write a letter and then put it in AI and get a better version.
Even taking a PDF and having AI summarize it for you is helpful. Another great thing is uploading a 30-page lease, asking the AI a bunch of questions and then asking it for an email to send to your landlord. When you get back the new lease, upload again and ask if all the changes have been made.
Take an ISO contract and ask, what are my liabilities? What ways can they stop paying me? Are there any other things in the contract I should be concerned about? You will get an answer that is better than reading 20-, 30- or 40-page documents, and a lot faster. We do this before we get our lawyer to review contracts.
Let's say you get some documents from a merchant: a driver's license, void check, bank statements and merchant statements. If you're not sure they are real, upload and ask. We find scammers sending us BS documents three to four times a week. The amount of fraud and stolen identities is nuts. We have a POS vendor that enabled AI, so the merchants can ask it a question, for example, how do I batch out?
How do I add an employee? How do I update a price? Instead of calling the help desk or searching through the FAQ, merchants can get answers quickly.
This has cut down on calls to the help desk and led to happy customers.Sometimes getting an answer requires calling support. Service reps can search on the POS screen, in the manager app, in the employee app and online.
The POS vendor is also working on menu pricing to help businesses see if their menus are priced correctly, in addition to using a few other AI tools merchants can use.
2. Leveraging AI in the broader ecosystem
AI—it's crawl, walk, run. AI is not going to take over. One thing for sure: learn how to use AI. Learn how to write prompts for AI. AI is going to make your job easier to do. Will it replace employees?
Employees that know how to use AI and program AI will get hired before people who do not know how to use AI.
3. Use of AI in the future
AI is going to be interesting to watch to see how it is used by processors, gateways, card brands, fraud and more. Many times, when people are talking about AI, they are also talking about automation. It's best to take a hybrid approach—humans using AI—everyone needs to start using AI and incorporate it into their day.
These are tools that can help you with your business.
Rod Hometh, RPY Innovations
Good questions! Here is my input.
1. On implementing AI in your business:
RPY is a payments consulting firm, and one of our core businesses is guiding clients through their AI implementations for underwriting and risk management. We've learned that the most critical first step is advising clients to build a robust data strategy, because even the most advanced AI is only as good as the data it's trained on. Our most significant successes have come from helping clients define narrow, high-impact use cases first, which ensures a clear and measurable return on their investment.
2. On AI in the broader ecosystem:
From RPY's consulting vantage point, we see the payments industry achieving its most effective results using AI for real-time fraud mitigation and creating personalized merchant financing and loyalty programs.
We advise our clients to be wary of the hype around general-purpose AI. For instance, some AI chatbot projects have underdelivered because they lacked the specialized knowledge required for complex payment inquiries. The real value lies in applying AI to solve specific, well-defined payment challenges.
3. On the future of AI in the industry:
Looking ahead, we see our consulting practice focused on helping clients leverage AI to build hyper-personalized payment journeys and navigate the complexities of AI-driven compliance and regulation (RegTech). Our primary concern is mitigating algorithmic bias and ensuring model transparency. We believe RPY's role will be to provide the essential human oversight and strategic validation that ensures our clients' AI initiatives are both effective and responsible.
Steven Feldshuh, Betterpay Group
Betterpay Group – AI implementation overview
At the Betterpay Group, we understand that AI has been introduced in several areas by our processing partners—including risk management, fraud protection, underwriting and more. However, these improvements are not yet transparent or evident in our daily operations. We have not observed noticeable enhancements in boarding, underwriting workflows, risk analysis or within the processor's portal. It's possible that these upgrades are either operating behind the scenes or still undergoing partial implementation.
AI impact within our office
Data-driven decision making: AI tools have empowered us to analyze trends more accurately, allowing for smarter business decisions based on real-time data. Sales trend analysis: Understanding merchant performance and forecasting behavior has become far more efficient.
Daily support and knowledge access: With AI-powered search engines, we're able to quickly find accurate answers to the wide range of field questions our 100+ agents encounter daily.
- Automated follow-ups: AI helps us manage and streamline follow-up communications to ensure our agents receive timely updates and guidance.
- Terminal analysis: We now use AI to evaluate terminal features and recommend the best hardware solutions for each merchant's unique business type.
- Statement interpretation: AI has improved our ability to decode interchange charts and clarify processing statement terms—enhancing merchant education and error correction (for example, issues like not batching daily or excessive keyed transactions).
- POS and processor comparison: AI tools assist us in identifying the ideal POS solutions and in creating battle cards to clearly articulate the benefits of our processors over competitors.
- Operational support: From drafting professional letters and agreements to responding to bank or processor inquiries, AI provides significant administrative and documentation support.
- Lead management: We have started integrating AI tools into our lead tracking and management systems, improving outreach and conversion strategies.
It's clear that while AI applications are still maturing, the payments industry's embrace of AI has already brought about tangible results in efficiency, accuracy and productivity. 
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