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Insights and Expertise

A note on what comes next
The back office is not the The good news is that the industry is beginning to wake
up to what back-office modernization can actually mean
background of the payments for the people doing the work, not just the bottom line.
story. It is the infrastructure on Modern platforms do not just improve margins and
reduce risk. They give back-office teams better tools to do
which the entire story depends. the work they are already doing with remarkable skill.

Dedicated companies have spent decades focused
specifically on this problem, building back-office
exhausting. Keeping critical infrastructure running with infrastructure that is designed to reduce the friction, the
tools that were not designed for today's volumes or today's manual effort, and yes, the midnight emergencies that
complexity is genuinely difficult, and the fact that it keeps have defined the experience for too long. The goal is not
working is a testament to the people doing the work, not to replace the expertise of back-office professionals. It is to
to the systems themselves. give that expertise a platform worthy of it.
You deserve to hear that the institutional knowledge you To the people who keep it running
carry has real, significant value, even when it does not feel
that way. The ability to navigate complexity that would To the reconciliation analyst who found the discrepancy
stop most people cold is a rare and underappreciated skill. nobody else could find. To the operations manager who
calmly triaged a settlement failure while everyone else
You deserve to hear that the midnight batch errors, the was panicking. To the team that came in on a holiday
inexplicable discrepancies, the systems that respond to weekend because something broke and it needed fixing.
perfectly reasonable requests with perfectly unreasonable To everyone who has ever stared at a batch error at 11p.m.
behavior, are not unique to your organization. This is and chosen, quietly and without fanfare, to fix it.
the reality of payments back-office work at payment
processing companies everywhere. You are not alone in it. The payments industry runs because of you.
Kate Knudsen is a Senior Program Director at BHMI. She has been in the
And you deserve to hear, plainly, that the payments payments industry for over 30 years and currently leads high-profile
industry would not function without you. back-office modernization projects for large financial services compa-
nies around the world. Kate can be reached at kate.knudsen@bhmi.
com or at 402-333-3300.

Insights and Expertise

Agentic Are we going to see a brand-new chargeback category:
"My AI did this"?
payments Against all the excitement, agentic payments are an en-
tirely new category of risk that no one is prepared for. The
Should you current payment and banking infrastructure was not de-
signed to handle certain elements of this new technology.
Moreover, those who manage payment and banking tasks
be worried? are not adequately trained to do so.

By Viktoria Soltesz Key areas such as how payments and banking affect tech-
nology, UX, compliance and other essential aspects of a
PSP Angels business are absent from accounting and economics cours-
es, as well as MBA programs. This means the people who
I is this year's buzzword. Everybody is talking manage payment- and banking-related tasks are already
about autonomous agents who will be shop- working in a blur and now also have to master this lesser-
ping on our behalf: finding the best deals, com- known, brand-new area they have never seen before.
A pleting the checkout and even authorizing pay-
ments, all without human intervention. But where does So how can businesses make sure they are taking advan-
the payer's responsibility end and the AI's start? Who tage of the opportunity instead of losing momentum?
should take the financial hit if something goes wrong?

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