x̄ - > Unlocking the Future of Payments with AI — IBM z Day 2025

Unlocking the Future of Payments with AI — Highlights from IBM z Day 2025

On IBM z Day 2025, innovators and industry leaders gathered to explore how artificial intelligence is reshaping payments — from lightning-fast routing to preemptive fraud defenses. Below are the distilled insights and practical implications for banks, processors, and fintech builders.

Powering Payments with AI Accelerators

The event opened with an overview of IBM’s Aspire and Spire accelerators, showcasing their ability to bring AI directly to the heart of business: real-time transactions and mission-critical workflows. These AI-powered hardware solutions deliver ultra-low latency, letting companies perform risk assessments, detect fraud — including at the point of authorization — and optimize operations with unprecedented speed.

Aspire focuses on embedded, on-chip inferencing for immediate predictions, while Spire is built to support larger, generative, and agentic AI models. This dual-pronged strategy ensures organizations can blend the security and power of IBM Z systems with the adaptability of cutting-edge AI.

Insights from Industry Leaders

• Anoop Thomas, EVP & CTO, ACI: Highlighted ACI’s five-decade legacy in global payments, handling trillions of dollars daily and serving 94 countries. Anoop described how AI is vital for keeping fraudsters at bay, as they too employ sophisticated AI techniques. Real-time fraud detection — powered by IBM Z and ACI’s extensible, agile infrastructure — enables industry leaders to process vast transaction volumes in milliseconds, adapting quickly to new threats and data sources.
• Agnes and Thomas, Handelsbanken: Shared their journey from a student master’s thesis to full production of a real-time fraud detection system. Their bank now leverages machine learning models to protect customers, showing how innovation often starts with individual initiative, then scales to enterprise impact.

How AI is Changing Payment Processing

• Optimizing Routing: AI enables smarter, faster routing of payments, reducing costs and approval times.
• Real-Time Decisioning: Models aggregate data from diverse sources — beyond just payments — to make the best possible decisions almost i