Fintech Insider Podcast by 11:FS
00:12:25 · Kate Moody
[00:12:25] S0: Yeah. No. Absolutely. I guess the other thing I was keen to get your take on, Dan, is I think Plum's in a really interesting position because you are a, you know, an intelligence player that sits on top of mostly other people's accounts, Whereas some of the other players that you mentioned who have already moved into the Tata sports space, know, Aviva, Barclays, I'm assuming are mostly kind of focusing sort of inward on their own sort of product suite. Has that shifted how you've thought about the potential of targeted support? You know, obviously you are looking into other people's accounts potentially. We know that customers have in many cases, in multiple parts of world, like quite fragmented financial lives where their money is in multiple different places across different accounts. So yeah, suppose I'm intrigued whether potentially Plum has a bigger opportunity with targeted support because you're not just looking into your own universe and trying to make it better within the bounds of your own, your own bank or investment platform.
00:13:19 · Daniel Wills
[00:13:19] S2: Yeah, absolutely, Kate. I think when we do that, what we, what we find is a lot of our customers, what they like to do is save money in cash. Right? And I think that feeling of safety deserves a lot of respect, wanting the security of cash. It's not an irrational feeling, especially when, you know, today's news, not just today, but ongoing, is full of uncertainty. We just had the budget here in The UK and household budgets are stretched, and that's part of what our Auckland budget was focusing on. So I think the approach is to show the way, not push our customers down a particular direction. So we want to be honest about the trade off. So cash obviously protects you from the short term ups and downs, but over longer periods with rising prices, obviously, that can erode cash's value in real time. So investing has historically offered a lot of potential for growth, but the value can obviously go up and down as well. So you need to be comfortable wearing that level of risk. But it is something that we want to talk to our customers about through the bot. If we feel like it's the right thing for our customers, I think it's just as important for the bot to say it's not right at this present time. But we want to make that experience as personal as possible. And we feel we're already doing that, particularly when it comes, for example, to retirement. We can show someone the age they'd like to retire based on a conversation where they've selected that age and what they're currently on track for and obviously giving them that opportunity ahead of time to to bridge that gap rather than getting to to retirement and not being able to retire on your own terms. So giving people, you know, support through this new targeted support is how we feel, you know, it's a massive opportunity and we consider it a really an important responsibility to deliver good outcomes for our customers.
00:15:16 · Kate Moody
[00:15:16] S0: Yeah. Yeah, as I think we've alluded to throughout this conversation so far, obviously, it's a new initiative. We're still kind of seeing how it's how it's playing out with multiple different players in the market. So kudos to to the team at Plum for for getting the approval and getting it live and yeah, we'd be excited to keep an eye on this to see how it how it plays out in the customer experience and how customers interact with it as well. Okay. On to our next story, and this has been taken from the papers, and that is Chargebacks911 launches indemnification for AI agent purchases. US based dispute management company, Chargebacks911, has launched a new service designed to protect merchants against qualifying chargebacks arising from purchases made by AI agents on behalf of consumers. As AI agents increasingly search, compare, and purchase products for consumers, questions are emerging around authorization, liability, and who bears the cost when a transaction is disputed. The service uses AI technology, behavioral intelligence, and dispute data to identify agent initiated transactions, assess their risk, and determine which qualify for indemnification. It operates alongside merchants' existing fraud prevention and payment infrastructure without requiring changes to their checkout systems. Brad, I'm obviously gonna come to you first on this one. Congratulations on the launch. Obviously we've touched a little bit on AI already in discussion of Plum's story, and obviously I'm guessing it's a massive focus for you guys as well. Could you maybe talk our listeners through kind of how you've got to this offering, kind of again we'll have a mixture of levels of understanding of of AI and its complexity amongst our base. It'd be good to understand a bit more about you. What made you decide to to introduce this service?
00:16:52 · Brad Wiskirchen
[00:16:52] S4: You know, at Chargebacks911, we have been resolving disputes for a decade and a half initially. It started with credit card transactions, but we evolved rather quickly and far before anyone else to cover all sorts of transactions, be it ACH, be it alternative payments, etcetera. We've always been at the forefront. We're certainly the first to leverage artificial intelligence in in the dispute resolution process. And so trying to always stay one step ahead of of challenges for merchants, Fintechs, and banks alike, we recognize that although it's a very small percentage of overall transactions right now, transactions initiated by AI agents are are the future. It's going to happen more regularly. It's going to happen more aggressively, and it will become ubiquitous. So it behooved us to take the vast amounts of data that we collect and create from the 2,500,000 merchants and banks that we represent globally in basically every country in which we are authorized to do business by the US government and take that data and apply it to artificial intelligence in order to help us with this solution. So effectively, what we're doing now is taking what is nascent but will become huge, and we're providing merchants, banks, and fintechs with certainty so they can engage in digital commerce with with the AI agents. And we're doing that through an indemnification product where whereby they can accept the transactions with certainty and and truly not worry about whether the transaction ultimately ends up in a dispute or not because they've got the certainty that we'll take care of it if it does.
00:18:47 · Kate Moody, Brad Wiskirchen
[00:18:47] S0: Yeah. I'm sure I probably butchered the explanation in our intro. Like, I'm sure there's a huge amount of complexity behind the scenes. I suppose from the perspective of an ordinary consumer, as you say, you know, we're probably expecting the number of consumers using these types of agents to make payments, pay purchases to increase. Like, what is it gonna look like if you're an ordinary consumer using an AI agent? Will will you see this experience, or will... Is this something that just happens completely behind the scenes? How does it work? [00:19:15] S4: The consumer won't see our experience. We're actually more on the merchant side or the service provider side, etcetera. But it's like consumers engaging in a in a transaction leveraging an AI agent, and they certainly know it because they've they've authorized the agent. They've created the agent. They've made it possible for the agent to engage in commerce on their behalf. So it's just when those transactions that are initiated by the consumer's agent end up in a dispute with the penultimate provider of the good or service that we get engaged on behalf of the penultimate provider of the good or service, be it an online retailer, etcetera. So we're there to to help that online retailer or any of their service... Upstream service providers from a payment perspective deal with the inevitable disputes that will arise from this new form of commerce.
00:19:15 · Brad Wiskirchen, Kate Moody
[00:19:15] S4: The consumer won't see our experience. We're actually more on the merchant side or the service provider side, etcetera. But it's like consumers engaging in a in a transaction leveraging an AI agent, and they certainly know it because they've they've authorized the agent. They've created the agent. They've made it possible for the agent to engage in commerce on their behalf. So it's just when those transactions that are initiated by the consumer's agent end up in a dispute with the penultimate provider of the good or service that we get engaged on behalf of the penultimate provider of the good or service, be it an online retailer, etcetera. So we're there to to help that online retailer or any of their service... Upstream service providers from a payment perspective deal with the inevitable disputes that will arise from this new form of commerce. [00:20:12] S0: Matthew, keen to bring bring you in, kinda get your take on this from from what you're seeing. Does this feel like a move in the right direction? Do you think there's a real need for this kind of service?