How to humanize mobile payments?

While reading about the new Google initiative PAIR which is looking to humanize artificial intelligence (AI), I simply asked myself “how might we humanize mobile payments?”. I don’t want to say that m-payments are inhuman nowadays, however, could they become less tech focused and more “human centric”?

First of all, what does it mean “to humanize”?  The goal of Google’s PAIR is to focus on the „human side“ of AI: the relationship between users and technology, the new applications it enables, and how to make it broadly inclusive. Looking on Google Search for the word it comes up with the following:

Another definition says: “to make (someone or something) seem gentler, kinder, or more appealing to people”. This is what I used to discuss in articles before with regards to innovation: make something easier, faster or better. But more precisely?

The same source gives another example further down: “Medical Definition of humanize –  to render (cow’s milk) suitable for consumption by human babies”. To create an analogy one could say: “to render payments suitable for people’s everyday activities”.

It’s not about technology

To come back to Google who says: “Instead of viewing AI purely as a technology, what if we imagine it as a material to design with?”…. would turn into “instead of viewing payments as transactions, what if we imagine it as a material to design with?”.

Ealier this month Mastercard send some news that it wants to use AI to deliver an enhanced customer experience and security. Machine learning (one of the areas of AI) has been used to detect and prevent fraud for some time. For example, Paypal uses intelligent algorithms to detect if it’s me making a payment or if the behavior does not fit in with my habits (being better than rule based fraud detection and having already secured my purchases on various occasions for years where my cards were declined when being abroad). But I don’t want to discuss how AI can and already does improve security. What I am interested in is the “enhanced customer experience”.

How might we improve the customer experience?

I have been looking for examples how AI improves the customer experience (CX) in existing payment offerings. Of course, a declined payment is a very bad user experience and therefore the stated case is already very important. But what’s beyond? Everything CX but NOT fraud related. How might we humanize payments with a better customer experience taking advantage of artificial intelligence tech? What could that look like?