Moving money faster has compressed the time banks have to answer a more complicated question: How should this particular payment move?

A transaction can arrive through online or mobile banking, an API or, potentially, an artificial intelligence agent. The bank may have several ways to send the money, including batch and instant rails. Before choosing one, it still has to consider fraud, risk, customer requirements, fees, timing and whether the recipient information is correct.

Nilesh Dusane, global head of institutional payments at AWS, said the underlying obligations haven’t disappeared as payment options have expanded.

“You need to do KYC [know your customer], you need to ingest payment instructions, you need to do risk management, you need to figure out the fees and then ultimately route the payment over an appropriate rail,” Dusane told PYMNTS.

The challenge is getting those functions to work within the time available for a particular transaction. An instant rail may be available without being necessary for a payment that isn’t time sensitive. A transaction that does require immediate settlement gives the bank far less time to complete the checks and routing decisions that precede it.

Cross-border payments add another set of variables. An originating bank must determine whether beneficiary information is valid and whether factors such as processing windows and time zones will affect the transaction. It also can’t necessarily answer every question itself.

“There are certain things a bank can do on their own, but then there are certain things which they have to rely on the beneficiary bank” to provide, Dusane said.

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