As part of New York Tech Week 2026, J.P. Morgan Payments and Tech:NYC hosted an exclusive media breakfast on June 2 featuring an on-the-record fireside chat between Zack Anderson, Chief Data & Analytics Officer at J.P. Morgan Payments, and Bloomberg Reporter Paige Smith.

The conversation, which follows last year’s fireside chat with J.P. Morgan Payments Head of Technology Sri Shivananda, covered some of today’s most consequential questions in payments technology and infrastructure: how banks have evolved their relationship with AI, what it means to operate agentic systems at scale and why treasury automation remains an early-stage opportunity. Anderson addressed four themes central to how we’re approaching AI in payments:

AI in Banking is Maturing

J.P. Morgan Payments has long applied machine learning and AI across fraud detection, sanctions screening and risk management. What's changed is the scope. Those capabilities are now spreading across the organization and being used across the industry, with most AI agents operating invisibly in the background, improving the efficiency and reliability of payment flows.

Agentic AI and the Question of Delegation

As AI becomes more prevalent, organizations face a fundamental governance challenge: deciding what they are willing to delegate to a machine, at what thresholds, and under what conditions. Anderson noted that while agentic commerce has made this intuitive for consumers, the same question becomes considerably more consequential in a payments context. He pointed to high-value payment authorization as the clearest test case: auditability - knowing why a payment was made and under what policy - is the foundation for an agentic system

Geographic and Compliance Complexity

Cross-border payments involve a layered web of jurisdictional rules that vary significantly by market, adding nuances that are difficult for humans to manage consistently at scale. Anderson sees this as an area of meaningful near-term opportunity for AI, processing and applying the volume and specificity of rules required to keep payment flows moving reliably, with the potential to drive materially fewer rejections over time.

Treasury is Next, but Not Yet

AI investment in large organizations remains concentrated in customer-facing functions, with treasury and finance further down the priority list. Anderson defined agentic treasury as a control system for the movement of money, and pointed to data foundations, clear policies and governance infrastructure as the prerequisites that need to be solved before the technology can deliver on its potential.

Dig Deeper

• Read FinAi News’ article, “J.P. Morgan Payments not worried about escalating token cost, exec says,” citing insights from the fireside chat.
• Check out how we’re applying AI and robotics to our lockbox operations here and the latest accolades for our leadership in AI and data & analytics innovation here.
• Listen to our recent Pay it Forward podcast episode, which highlights what it means to embrace AI in the workplace here.