WEX Executive: Real-Time Payments Are Speeding Up, but Risk Controls and Reconciliation Must Keep Pace

Payment platform WEX's Senior Vice President of Corporate Payments and Technical Fellow Taranjit Singh said in an interview published by PYMNTS on October 29, 2026, that payment technology has long advanced around three things: expanding access to funds, moving money faster at lower cost, and building trust through security and compliance. He noted that real-time payments compress the window for identifying problematic transactions, handling exceptions and verifying the identity of counterparties.

Singh said embedded finance embeds payment capabilities into business processes such as invoicing and SaaS, with more of the customer experience taking place outside traditional banking interfaces, but payment providers must still bear responsibility for compliance, anti-money laundering and risk frameworks. He warned that splitting fraud and risk management across different providers can easily create blind spots, while an integrated provider can see both customer-facing payments and underlying money flows at the same time.

On AI, Singh described an "AI versus AI" landscape: attackers can use generative AI to synthesize identities, while financial institutions use models to identify suspicious behavior. He believes models need to combine contextual data, institutional knowledge and compliance guardrails, otherwise false positive rates will rise. According to him, WEX has 40 years of proprietary payments data. With authorization, AI can also be used for reconciliation, exception handling and integrating structured and unstructured information. He also said payment security depends on the weakest vendor in the software supply chain.

Source: https://www.pymnts.com/news/payments-innovation/2026/ai-and-embedded-finance-raise-the-bar-for-payment-controls/