While AI is reshaping almost every corner of financial services, the payments industry faces a question that extends beyond technology: Is AI primarily a cost-cutting tool, or can it become a driver for creating better commerce experiences?
“We basically look at it from a vitamin perspective, giving it to our existing employees to make them stronger, better and more scalable.” Ben GreverPresident and Chief Operating Officer of Maverick Paymentshe said to PYMNTS during a conversation for the June edition of “What’s next in payments?A series titled “Aspirin or Vitamin? How Artificial Intelligence is Rewriting the Way Customers Buy.”
This distinction reflects a broader shift occurring across industries. The most immediate returns from AI may come from automation, but longer-term value can arise from enhancing human performance rather than eliminating it.
“If we can reduce our customer service SLA from 22 seconds to 10 seconds as we continue to grow this team, that’s where we see the value with AI,” Grever said.
After all, increasing human capabilities at scale allows companies to gain one of the most competitive advantages in the payment industry: human expertise.
“We think there’s a lot of value, especially in financial services, getting that hands-on support and that human touch,” Grever said. “Equipping them with artificial intelligence makes it highly scalable.”
Artificial intelligence as a force multiplier
As the industry experiments with AI, Grever 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 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 integrating AI into workflows 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 higher volume, make faster decisions, and improve service levels.
“We’re doubling down on our efforts in areas like customer service because we strongly believe that in financial services, when a merchant or partner needs to contact us, especially if it’s time sensitive, they can get someone on the phone, and they can deal with a real human being,” Grever said.
This philosophy becomes especially important with the acceleration of payments. Real-time payments, proxy commerce and automated transactions are compressing decision cycles across the industry. Human judgment is still crucial, but humans need better tools to keep pace.
“The only way to keep up is to pair humans, whether it’s risk analysts or someone on board, with AI so they have the tools to keep up,” Grever said.
From payment processing to payment infrastructure
Maverick occupies an increasingly important place within the payments ecosystem. Rather than focusing solely on merchants, the company serves a network of reseller partners that include independent sales organizations, software vendors, and vertical SaaS platforms.
The model arose from direct experience. Grever noted that Maverick originally started as a sales organization, which gave the company direct exposure to many of the operational challenges its customers still face today.
“We took a lot of the pain we faced when we started Maverick in 2012,” he said.
These frustrations prompted the company to build a white-label infrastructure platform designed to reduce complexity for partners. The goal was to eliminate the fragmented approach that often requires providers to bring multiple vendors together for onboarding, analytics, dispute management, and payment processing.
As payments become an integral part of software platforms, these infrastructure challenges become more apparent. Legacy providers often suffer from cumbersome setup processes, limited reporting capabilities, and inconsistent brand experiences.
“We definitely hear their pain,” Grever said. “We felt that way once.”
This shared experience has helped shape Maverick’s strategy as software platforms seek to monetize payments while avoiding the burden of building financial infrastructure themselves. The Maverick platform integrates multiple sponsor banks and processing platforms into a unified system. This infrastructure allows partners to create payment-enabled products without taking on the burden of compliance and operation themselves.
“What you can’t program is the infrastructure,” Grever said. “We provide that basic foundation on which they can anchor.”
a witness Full interview With Maverick Payments President and COO Ben Griefer to hear more about:
- Why the biggest opportunity for AI in the payments industry may be augmentation, not automation.
- How AI is accelerating software development while making infrastructure more valuable.
- Why can a hybrid AI strategy outperform both aggressive adopters and cautious adversaries?
