NMI and AI: How We’re Driving Payments Innovation

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) has seen faster mass adoption than any other technology in history, almost doubling the adoption rate of the internet itself. With so much change happening so quickly, many of our partners have reached out to ask us how NMI is integrating AI internally, and what that means for their own businesses, the quality of their service and the future of payments as a whole.

So, a year after our first inside look at artificial intelligence at NMI, it’s time, once again, to share some of the exciting new ways we’re employing the latest AI tools, including:

• Improving partner services and support through deeper analysis of data
• Exploring the frontiers of agentic AI for development
• Creating new educational resources to make AI more accessible
• Securing our partners and their data through constantly evolving AI use policies
• Internally crowdsourcing future AI applications through our first-ever hackathon

Payments is a data-heavy and now data-driven industry. At NMI, we’re using internal AI tools to perform deeper analyses on the enormous amounts of data generated by everything from internal insights to support tickets to sales calls. That’s enabling us to clarify the voice of our customers and recognize new, subtle patterns that can tell us a lot about pain points and partner needs.

Here are a few examples

• Performing deep sentiment analysis on partner interactions: By analyzing interactions with our channel account managers (CAMs), tech support team and our AI support agent, Penny, we can decipher and score partner sentiment and identify common pain points. These deeper insights enable us to improve our products and processes and help our CAMs proactively assist and educate partners
• Analyzing processing data to identify opportunities for partners: Revenue data can tell you a lot about merchants, but parsing an entire portfolio’s worth of numbers is beyond the capabilities of most businesses. We’re exploring how we can use AI to efficiently analyze a partner’s portfolio and use that huge volume of information to identify opportunities to help them save money, offer new extensions to the right merchants and reduce merchant churn. While it’s currently in the PoC (proof of concept) phase, it’s another exciting use case that we are hoping to build out in the future

AI coding tools are changing the way software is developed. At NMI, we’re already using tools like Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini and GitHub Copilot to help us streamline coding, refine testing and generate documentation. Now, we’re also exploring the cutting edge of what AI can do after a successful agentic AI development pilot.

Under the new program, we’re using the latest coding agents like Cursor and Claude Code to improve the entire development workflow. By tracking the results, weighing each agent’s strengths and weaknesses, identifying failure points and refining best practices, we’re not only streamlining our development process today but also building a foundation to support the use of these powerful tools at an even larger scale in the future, as we build the next generation of payments tech for our partners.

Education plays a huge part in our AI strategy. We’re constantly developing new resources to help our partners and internal team understand where AI is heading, what tools are currently available and how those tools can help them. Just a few examples of our current AI education programs include:

• The NMI AI Hub: We’ve recently launched an internal AI resource hub designed to make AI more accessible and productive for all NMI employees, from engineering to support and everyone in between. The goal is to demystify AI so everyone at NMI can use it to increase productivity, boost creativity and unlock new ways of thinking
• How-to Guides: We’re developing a growing list of extensive how-to guides that teach our team everything they need to know about using AI for engineering tasks, AI developer responsibility, troubleshooting issues, general prompt engineering and more
• Prompt Resources: The quality of a prompt has a huge impact on the quality of the generated result. Our collaborative prompt library provides our team with sample prompts and generic and model-specific best practices to make it easy to get the most from our AI tools
• The AI Snacks Podcast: Everyone learns differently, and we want to deliver self-serve access to AI education in whatever format works best for any given individual. For those with an auditory learning style, we launched the AI Snacks podcast — a series of short, 10- to 15-minute episodes covering everything from the basics to AI ethics to machine learning and beyond. Check out AI Snacks on Spotify

For years, AI has been a core part of how we protect our partners and their merchants. Tools like our Kount anti-fraud extension use AI and machine learning to analyze billions of transactions and proactively get better at catching bad guys in real time. Now, in the age of generative AI, how we protect internal data has become an equally critical part of delivering exceptional service to our partners.

Constantly Evolving AI Security Policies

The NMI security team analyzes and reviews all potential uses of artificial intelligence, and ensures that our data is secure and is not used to train any third-party models. That means both our internal work and, even more importantly, any partner data that we analyze will never be used for external model training and can’t be accessed by anyone but our secure internal teams. This is a never-ending review process that ensures our AI policies are always up to date with the newest shifts in technology and the newest threats.

The NMI AI Council

The trajectory of our AI strategy is guided by our AI Council — a team of internal subject matter experts that covers every potential angle, including AI technology, engineering, legal and governance. This team exists to ensure that, as we look for new ways to employ AI in our products and processes, we always stay aligned with our vision for the future of payments and our responsibilities to our partners.

Earlier this year, we held our inaugural NMI Hackathon during which any NMI employee could pitch a potential AI-powered application and assemble a small team to prototype and showcase their ideas. In total, eight teams submitted pitches, and an astonishing six of them were so promising that they’ve been sponsored by our product and engineering teams to move forward in production.

Each of the six sponsored pitches employs AI to solve real business problems by refining our internal processes or extending new, improved services to our partners. 

NMI has been leading innovation in the payments industry for over twenty years, and our commitment to keeping our partners on the cutting edge has never been stronger. As new applications for artificial intelligence change the face of payments, our partners can rest assured that NMI will always be ready to serve as a trusted adviser and next-gen technology partner who keeps them at the forefront of the industry, securely and responsibly.