Could Voice Emerge as the Payments Power Tool?

Watch more: What’s Next in Payments: i2c’s John Bresnahan

Businesses are finally (and finely) honing their 21st-century competitive edges.

The result? Advancement across the marketplace today is becoming increasingly dependent on operating discipline, intelligent automation and a new wave of technologies.

And while artificial intelligence (AI) dominates headlines across every industry, John Bresnahan, global head of operations at i2c, told PYMNTS the payments and commerce landscape isn’t focusing solely on AI but, instead, is also applying technologies and improvements to the underlying, invisible infrastructures that make transactions faster, safer and more resilient.

When asked to name his “unsung hero” of 2024–25 during a discussion for the most recent edition of the What’s Next in Payments series, “Unsung Heroes,” Bresnahan sidestepped generative AI entirely. Instead, he spotlighted an older but rapidly maturing discipline: natural language processing (NLP) and high-accuracy speech transcription.

“I think it’s probably unfair to call AI an unsung hero. It’s pretty sung,” he said.

Instead, and particularly in today’s operating landscape where fines, cyber threats and public scrutiny continue to escalate, it’s transcription technology — the same voice-to-text solutions once seen as mundane — that has emerged as a key operational multiplier.

Why Voice Transcription is an Unsung Benefit

For decades, voice-to-text platforms were more novelty than utility, constrained by error rates too high for industries where precision is non-negotiable. Payments was one of those industries. After all, a minor misinterpretation in a recorded call can trigger compliance failures, mis-servicing or legal exposure.

But as AI models and systems advance, accurate voice transcription is becoming a real possibility.

“The accuracy levels are now incredible,” Bresnahan said. “They often refer to their word error rate, and it’s 1 or 2%, meaning 98, 99% accurate.”

That order-of-magnitude jump, he added, makes the difference between an assistive tool and a strategic capability.

The payoff is already visible. i2c, for its part, now records and transcribes nearly 100% of its calls, turning every customer interaction into data that can be audited, analyzed and operationalized.

The takeaway? While many FinTechs may treat compliance as a constraint, Bresnahan framed it as a value-creation engine for clients, especially those navigating complex regulatory landscapes or preparing for examinations. i2c positions itself not just as a processor but also as a partner that provides both the capability and the evidence needed to pass muster with regulators.

Superior Fraud Prevention With Minimal Customer Friction

While Bresnahan resisted calling AI “unsung,” he acknowledged that i2c’s own human-in-the-loop AI fraud model has reached a new level of sophistication. The goal: block more fraud while maintaining a seamless consumer experience.

“We’re able to prevent up to 40% of fraud with a 0.5% customer friction level,” Bresnahan said, noting that only a few years ago, catching 40% of fraud attempts at scale would have required far more user friction spanning steps like step-up authentication, manual reviews or card declines.

All of those tactics ultimately eroded trust, particularly given today’s consumer expectations for instant approvals and invisible security, with a tolerance for extra steps hovering near zero.

The remaining 60% of undetected fraud, Bresnahan underscored, is the next frontier. But progress cannot come at the cost of customer experience. That’s what makes identity so powerful across the commerce landscape.

“We’ve all suffered the frustration of not being able to authenticate that we are who we say we are,” he said. “You have to provide the fraud security that we’re looking for, but also deliver a customer experience that doesn’t drive them off.”

The Power of a Unified Processing Platform

Payments companies often grow through acquisition, assembling portfolios of siloed platforms that vary by region, product or client type. Over time, these patchworks can become operational liabilities by introducing failure points, elevating maintenance costs and slowing innovation.

i2c chose a different path, one that is now paying dividends.

“Unlike a lot of other processors maintaining lots of different platforms, that’s not ever been our approach,” he said. “We have one unified platform that supports all products, all geographies, all currencies.”

The single-platform strategy also extends to application programming interfaces (APIs) designed using building-block principles. In an industry where speed to market is often the determining factor for newcomers, a modular, composable platform can be a force multiplier.

“That enables all these endless combinations to support whichever product or use case that a client may have or need,” Bresnahan said.

This results in a lower cost of ownership for clients who, through a single, unified platform, can meet the unique market needs or regulatory requirements of local markets.

Payments, after all, is a confidence business. The real breakthroughs are those that ensure the system works flawlessly, billions of times per day, without fanfare.