Solutions
Advisory across AI-driven payments, real-time rails, cross-border infrastructure and ISO 20022 migration. From architecture design through to scheme compliance and go-live.
Artificial intelligence is reshaping every layer of the payments stack, from real-time fraud decisioning and credit underwriting to customer authentication and dispute management. Financial institutions are moving beyond rules-based systems towards adaptive models that process transaction context, behavioural signals and external data simultaneously. The commercial benefits are material: reduced false positives, lower fraud losses, faster onboarding and improved customer retention. Advisory engagements typically focus on model selection, data governance, regulatory compliance (particularly explainability requirements under EU AI Act) and vendor evaluation.
Instant payment rails are now operational across every major payments market, each with distinct technical specifications, liquidity requirements, and fraud characteristics. SARIE in Saudi Arabia recorded 42% annual volume growth in 2025. Aani in the UAE processed over 180 million transactions in its first year. SEPA Instant is mandatory for eurozone banks. FedNow has over 1,000 US financial institutions connected. The defining characteristic of all instant rails is irrevocability: funds settle in seconds and cannot be recalled through normal banking channels, which fundamentally alters the fraud and AML risk model. For payment firms connecting to these rails, the operational challenges include 24/7/365 liquidity management, intraday credit facilities, ISO 20022 message enrichment, and fraud controls that must operate pre-transaction rather than post-settlement.
The GCC is home to some of the world's highest remittance corridors by GDP share, Saudi Arabia and the UAE collectively send over $70bn annually to South and Southeast Asia, Africa, and the Levant. The commercial and regulatory complexity of cross-border payments has expanded as AML obligations, FATF Travel Rule implementation, and licensing requirements have increased across every major corridor. Operating a cross-border payment or remittance business now requires layered licensing across originating and destination jurisdictions, robust correspondent banking relationships, and operational capability across multiple currencies and settlement systems. Payment Licensing advisory covers the specific regimes relevant to the firm's business model and target geographies: QCB, SAMA, CBUAE, ADGM, DIFC, FCA, and EU national competent authorities (De Nederlandsche Bank, Central Bank of Ireland, and others).
Payment orchestration sits between a merchant's commerce layer and its acquiring relationships, routing each transaction to the optimal processor based on cost, authorisation rate, geography, and scheme rules. The share of merchants routing across two or more PSPs has grown from 25% in 2022 to over 52% in 2026, driven by the measurable impact on authorisation rates, typically 3–8 percentage points, and the commercial leverage gained when no single acquirer holds monopoly access to the merchant's volume. Orchestration layers (Spreedly, Gr4vy, IXOPAY, and regional platforms) abstract acquirer relationships, manage tokenisation across processors, and provide unified reporting across payment methods and geographies. Advisory engagements focus on the build-vs-buy decision, vendor selection, least-cost routing logic, and the integration architecture required to avoid creating a new single point of failure in place of the one being removed.
Speak directly with a specialist across any of these areas.