Everyone has become excited about A2A in the past year or so. A2A are Account-to-Account payments. These are direct transfers of funds from one payment account (bank or e-money service) to another, bypassing intermediaries like card networks and reducing transaction costs and complexity. A2A payments leverage Open Banking technologies and APIs to deliver fast, seamless, and secure real-time payments directly between accounts for purchases, bill payments, and transfers between friends. The thing is that this is missing a few things for me. First, it’s missing the fact that there are a lot of automated payments which take place, such as subscriptions; and, second, it misses the fact that a lot of payments could be scams or fakes, so how to minimise fraud. These areas will be solved by bots.
Bots can be delegated and designated to select, recommend and generate orders and sales; and, of course generate fraud, scams and deep fakes but then, on the latter, they can also be used to identify and detect such fraud, scams and deep fakes. In other words A2A payments will be managed by B2B, or bot-to-bot, systems. That’s why we are moving from A2A to A2B2B2A … or is that BA2B2B2AC, as in Business via A2A and B2B to Consumer. Or is that B2B2A2B2B2A2C … I better stop there as this could get confusing (ed: you mean out of control don’t you?).
Anyways, the critical point here is that bots will take over everything between accounts. They do more than ordering and dealing with each other and sussing out what is real and isn’t real, but they will increasingly become gateways to markets. Dave Birch picked up on this years ago:
The big change in financial services will come when customers use AI to assess offers from financial institutions. They will have access to AI as powerful as the banks have – because Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon (and companies like them) will be giving it to them. And this will mean individuals won’t be the customers: their bots will be.
He’s always a way ahead, although I did say decades ago that the City could be run by one man and his dog.
What we are really getting into is everything being automated, digitised and intelligent, all of which sounds great … except when it doesn’t work. More on that tomorrow.
Chris M Skinner
Chris Skinner is best known as an independent commentator on the financial markets through his blog, TheFinanser.com, as author of the bestselling book Digital Bank, and Chair of the European networking forum the Financial Services Club. He has been voted one of the most influential people in banking by The Financial Brand (as well as one of the best blogs), a FinTech Titan (Next Bank), one of the Fintech Leaders you need to follow (City AM, Deluxe and Jax Finance), as well as one of the Top 40 most influential people in financial technology by the Wall Street Journal's Financial News. To learn more click here...