“Even though Fraud Is Happening Faster in the Age of ML, the Window by Which that Pattern Can Reoccur Is Way Shorter”

Silo Busting 48: Chase Petrey and Alex Jimenez on Digital Payments

So what’s in your mobile wallet? Questions around digital payments are on the minds of our two guests on this #TakeItToTheBank episode of Silo Busting. Chase Petrey, COO of Pi, and Alex Jimenez, Managing Principal, Financial Services Consulting at EPAM, talk—with great gusto—about real-time payments, data complexity and scale, the evolution of fraud risk monitoring, embedded finance, “fast fraud,” and bias in AI and machine learning.

The digital payment world has a fascinating history, one in which India has led the way. The US built a lot of the foundational infrastructure in the 60s and 70s and, according to Petrey: “We're still using those systems today because there's so much process built around those systems that, you know doing a rip and replace is just untenable.” But when it comes to digital payment innovation, he says, some booming BRIC economies are “really able to leapfrog the United States,” because they get to work on a “blue sky blank canvas with the luxury of current-day technology.”

Digital payments, our interlocutors note, require an enormous amount of computing power, even for something as straightforward as mobile check deposits. “The computing power to maintain all those aggregations at every customer level is insane,” says Petrey. “It's not just averages across the whole business, but it's averages at the individual member or customer level being computed in that moment.”

If you want to hear some fascinating about talk about financial services risk management and bringing what Petrey calls “the right friction to the right person,” then you’ve in the appropriate place. There is, in fact, nothing average about this conversation. And the transaction costs for listening? Zero!

Host: Alison Kotin
Engineer: Kyp Pilalas
Producer: Ken Gordon