Firms Discover AI’s Limit Is Infrastructure

Watch more: What’s Next in Payments With Maverick Payments’ Ben Griefer

As artificial intelligence (AI) reshapes nearly every corner of financial services, the payments industry is confronting a question that extends beyond technology: Is AI primarily a tool for cutting costs, or can it become an engine for creating better merchant experiences?

“We’re essentially looking at it from a vitamin perspective, giving it to our existing staff to make them stronger, better, more scalable,” Ben Griefer, president and chief operating officer at Maverick Payments, told PYMNTS during a conversation for the June edition of the “What’s Next in Payments” series, titled “Aspirin or Vitamin? How AI Is Rewriting How Clients Buy.”

That distinction reflects a broader shift occurring across industries. The most immediate returns from AI may come from automation, but the longer-term value could emerge from enhancing human performance rather than eliminating it.

“If we’re able to reduce our SLA (service-level agreement) for customer service from a 22-second hold time down to 10 seconds while we continue to grow that team, that’s what we see the value in with AI,” Griefer said.

After all, augmenting human capabilities at scale allows firms to gain the advantage of one of the payment industry’s most competitive advantages: human expertise.

“We think that there’s a huge value, especially being in financial services, having hands-on support and that human touch,” Griefer said. “Equipping them with AI makes it extremely scalable.”

AI as a Force Multiplier

As the industry experiments with AI, Griefer noted that he sees organizations falling into two broad camps. Some are aggressively replacing employees and restructuring operations around automation. Others remain cautious, often constrained by legacy technology stacks that make AI integration difficult.

For its own part, rather than shrinking customer-facing teams, Maverick is investing in technology designed to make those teams more effective. The company’s focus is on embedding AI into workflows ranging from underwriting and merchant onboarding to dispute management and analytics. Instead of removing people from the process, AI becomes an accelerator that allows employees to handle more volume, make faster decisions and improve service levels.

“We’re doubling down in areas like customer service because we are a big believer that in financial services, when a merchant or a partner needs to contact us, especially if it’s time sensitive, they can get someone on the phone, they can deal with a real human,” Griefer said.

The philosophy is particularly relevant as payments accelerate. Real-time payments, agentic commerce and automated transactions are compressing decision cycles throughout the industry. Human judgment remains critical, but humans need better tools to keep pace.

“The only way to keep up is pairing humans, whether it’s a risk analyst or an onboarding person, with AI so that they have the tools to keep up,” Griefer said.

From Payment Processing to Payment Infrastructure

Maverick occupies an increasingly important position within the payments ecosystem. Rather than focusing solely on merchants, the company serves a network of reseller partners that includes independent sales organizations, software vendors and vertical SaaS platforms.

The model emerged from firsthand experience. Griefer noted that Maverick originally began as a sales organization, giving the company direct exposure to many of the operational challenges its customers continue to face today.

“A lot of the pains they have, we once experienced when we started Maverick back in 2012,” he said.

Those frustrations led the company to build a white-labeled infrastructure platform designed to reduce complexity for partners. The goal was to eliminate the fragmented approach that often requires providers to stitch together multiple vendors for onboarding, analytics, dispute management and payment processing.

As payments become embedded within software platforms, those infrastructure challenges have become more visible. Legacy providers often struggle with cumbersome onboarding processes, limited reporting capabilities and inconsistent branding experiences.

“We definitely hear their pain,” Griefer said. “We’ve once felt it.”

That shared experience has helped shape Maverick’s strategy as software platforms seek to monetize payments while avoiding the burden of building financial infrastructure themselves. Maverick’s platform consolidates multiple sponsor banks and processing platforms into a unified system. That infrastructure enables partners to build payment-enabled products without taking on the compliance and operational burden themselves.

“What you cannot vibe code is infrastructure,” Griefer said. “We deliver that underlying foundation that they can bolt onto.”

Watch the full interview with Maverick Payments President and COO Ben Griefer to hear more about:

Why the payments industry’s biggest AI opportunity may be augmentation, not automation.

How AI is accelerating software development while making infrastructure more valuable.

Why a hybrid AI strategy could outperform both aggressive adopters and cautious holdouts.