Free Payments Now

I am fascinated by the implications of driver-less cars in terms of what it will do to liabilities. In a world where vehicles are all driven by cars, there would never (technically) be any driving under the influence offenses ever again; and when there is an accident, who will be liable for the damages? – the manufacturer of the car, the developer of the software that runs the car? What will happen with insurance companies when there is no liability to ensure against anymore? It is all interesting discussions and very thought-provoking.

Lately, there has been a lot of work done to create bots that will perform financial transactions – especially buying and selling investment instruments (read here) or acquiring scarce tickets (Read here). It strikes me that we may then have the same challenges here. Who will be responsible for fraud or identity theft? If payments are made by robots (and payments are accepted by robots), how will we be able to allocate liabilities? The bots will of course be acting on behalf of some legal entity, but can this entity be held liable for a bot’s action when something untoward is done?

There are also other interesting ideas that one should discuss:

• Could a Bot open a bank account and what would the status be regarding KYC?
• How would you be able to verify a Bot’s “identity” when the Bot claims that its identity has been stolen? Would it even be possible to steal a Bot’s identity? Would a Bot have an identity and if it does not have one, how would it be able to interact with digital financial systems?
• Would the channels to access financial systems be changed to accommodate bots? Today when we get stuck we phone the support center; what alternative channel would bots use?
• Do we even want bots to be in our payment eco-system?
• Can we stop them…?

It is likely that more payments will get automated in future, it is likely that Artificial Intelligence will be harnessed to do payments on our behalf, it is likely that devices (connected to the Internet) will perform payments on our behalf. We will need to embrace these changes, but we will also have to solve the challenges.