Special Report: The Last Consultant

‘Consultant’ can be a dirty word. It’s like ‘lawyer’ or ‘accountant’. It’s a word that makes some think about spending money on things because they have to. Not because they want to.

But what is the role of a consultant? When you boil it down, what does a payments consultant provide? Knowledge? Solutions? Answers to questions the client can’t – or doesn’t have the time to – answer themselves?

Consulting is a knowledge transfer business: The consultant knows something that their client does not.

In that sense, it’s no different from being a lawyer or accountant. Accountants solve tax problems, and lawyers solve legal problems. Payments consultants—and analysts—solve payment problems. They help banks innovate, meet regulations, and capture market opportunities.

Why? Because payments platforms are incredibly complex—beyond what any one person can fully understand. From customer initiation to payment processing, operations, messaging, and clearing to the nuts and bolts of the applications. No single person truly knows how it all fits together.

So, there are often problems, and problems cost money and impact customers. It’s the job of consultants to modernize these systems and install new ones. They take the friction out of payments. They help make payments less visible, interoperable, and faster – so you and I can send money to the people who need it.

But the world has irrevocably changed

What once took an army of consultants weeks to solve can now be fixed by a handful of experts, empowered by artificial intelligence (AI), in a fraction of the time. In The Last Consultant, we explore the impact of the biggest shift in payment modernization since the introduction of the computer.

Today, anyone can ask AI: What are the key changes in this year’s payment rule book? What are the new rules for sending a cross-border payment via Swift?

Consultants, business analysts, and technical analysts are starting to disappear. AI is already replacing generalist work. The question is: What happens next?

What happens when AI agents are introduced? How does a bank’s procurement and onboarding process adapt to allow AI agents to replace people on projects? What happens to pricing? Costs? The consulting and delivery business model?

We no longer need to wait for an analyst to create the building block documents of a project – payment rulebook comparisons and high-level business requirements. This work is already changing.

But what isn’t changing is the depth of complexity in payments work. The unique elements – where product rules overlay on payment systems that need to comply with the latest regulation – where innovation pushes towards invisible, frictionless, interoperable payments.  It is the unforeseen impacts of innovation, regulations, banks, products, and platforms that will matter. It is doing things that are new. It is the high-value end of any payments project. So, where does AI fit in? Where do consultants fit in this world?

The entire payments modernization business model will be impacted. We need new models for pricing and new ways to onboard and integrate AI agents and AI-enabled consultants. Information security rules need to be jettisoned – what new ones are needed?

In the next series of articles, we’ll tackle these challenges to define who will be the Last Consultant. We’ll look at how banks will need to adapt to unlock the full potential of AI-enabled payments experts and their teams of AI agents. And, most importantly, we’ll investigate the new value they will bring—and at what cost.

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