Marie-Christine Diaz, Senior Business Strategy Manager for Payments, and Tareq Shaheen, PDM Director of Payment Solutions at Eastnets, showcase the benefits of a holistic approach to A2A payments.
How do instant payment mandates worldwide seek to regulate and improve the A2A payments space?
Tareq Shaheen (T.S.): Instant payment mandates are reshaping the account-to-account (A2A) payments space by enforcing standards that ensure speed, security, and interoperability. They establish a common compliance baseline for consumer and business protection. However, compliance alone isn’t enough. Real-time irrevocable payments expose institutions to new risks that require intelligent, layered defences.
Instant payment mandates are making A2A payments an integral part of daily life, enabling individuals and businesses to move funds seamlessly within their local economies. More importantly, these mandates are also laying the foundation for a future where cross-border A2A payments can be just as fast, secure, and convenient. However, with this ubiquity comes increased exposure to risks such as fraud. Regulatory frameworks, like the EU’s Instant Payments Regulation (IPR), serve as valuable models globally. IPR introduces critical safeguards, such as mandatory EPC Verification of Payee (VoP), to ensure user protection and build trust in the ecosystem. Such mechanisms should be adopted more widely to maintain both the security and scalability of instant A2A payments across regions.
What does a ‘holistic approach’ to A2A payments mean in practice, and why should it be a strategic priority for financial institutions?
Marie-Christine Diaz (M.C.D.): Instant A2A payments hold significant potential, not only as a faster alternative to traditional bank transfers but also as a compelling replacement for cash, card transactions, and person-to-person remittances, fostering financial inclusion. As customer protection improves with strict regulatory guidelines, fraudsters are shifting focus, creating fraud patterns that are difficult to deter with traditional rule-based systems and processes, leading to irreversible losses and damaged reputations.
Institutions must adopt contextual risk evaluation and spot anomalies within seconds, without friction. A holistic approach connects the dots across payment channels, payment instruments, and compliance domains. It also breaks down the risk monitoring silos between fraud, anti-money laundering (AML), sanctions, and know your customer (KYC) processes up to the original purchase or trade transaction itself. It requires orchestrating risk controls dynamically and embedding modular risk scoring across the entire financial supply chain transaction lifecycle.
How can innovation in AI/ML and blockchain-based tech improve real-time fraud detection and prevention?
T.S.: At Eastnets, we deploy AI/ML models that analyse behavioural and transactional patterns across channels, not just isolated payment events. These models can flag anomalies in milliseconds, allowing institutions to stop or review suspicious transactions before the funds are lost. Blockchain technologies further enhance this by enabling shared ledgers or audit trails across institutions, supporting collaborative fraud prevention and immutable evidence in cases of disputes. Eastnets’ AI and blockchain modules can trace transaction provenance and feed immediate insights back into the detection engine, without human intervention, and with full transparency.
AI/ML can process vast amounts of transactional data in real time to detect anomalous behaviour across accounts, channels, and geographies. Unlike traditional rule-based systems, ML models continuously evolve by learning from new fraud patterns, including sophisticated tactics such as social engineering and synthetic identity fraud. On the other hand, blockchain offers a tamper-proof ledger that enhances auditability and enables secure, trusted data sharing between FIs – especially valuable in collaborative fraud detection networks. Additionally, smart contracts can be programmed to enforce fraud controls based on predefined conditions, such as transaction limits, risk scores, or identity verification outcomes. Together, AI/ML and blockchain can deliver a powerful, real-time fraud prevention framework that is both adaptive and transparent.
How can a holistic strategy for real-time payments help balance operational efficiency and regulatory mandates, while also improving the customer journey?
M.C.D.: Balancing trust and customer experience is the biggest challenge in the instant payment ecosystem. A siloed risk approach often leads to either misdirected fraudulent payments or rejected legitimate payments. Integrating contextual information from both internal and external sources can build richer risk profiles, block fraudulent transactions, and filter out legitimate ones. Manually analysing complex datasets is no longer viable. AI/ML models, trained on behaviour patterns, transaction histories, resolution replaying, and relationship linking, provide more accurate insights in real time. The question isn’t whether AI/ML can help – it’s how to implement them effectively, efficiently, and sustainably.
Eastnets’ unified risk framework leverages AI models to process large contextual datasets in real time across silos and dynamically adapt to new risk conditions over time. From basic diagnostics to full resolution, the continuum of AI decision-making is clearly explained and factually documented. Our goal is to improve risk monitoring precision with confidence, in real time, 24/7.
Given the irreversibility of instant A2A payments, what specific mechanisms can help prevent or contain fraud before funds are moved?
T.S.: Prevention is the only viable option when recovery isn’t guaranteed. Eastnets addresses this with three layers of defence:
Combined, these allow FIs to intervene before a transaction is approved, often without customer-visible delays. It’s about detecting intent, not just anomalies. Given the irreversibility of instant A2A payments, fraud must be prevented before funds are moved.
This editorial piece was first published in The Paypers' Account-to-Account Payments Report 2025, which features insights into global trends, key players, partnerships, and the next phase of the A2A evolution. Access the full report to understand where the A2A payments ecosystem stands today and what’s next.
About Marie-Christine Diaz
A seasoned payments professional, Marie-Christine is a Senior Business Strategy Manager for Payments at Eastnets. She joined Eastnets in 2023 as Business Developer Manager for Payments in Europe. Previously, she held various roles as Programme, Market, Product and Consulting Manager at SWIFT and Isabel Group, where she developed the payments market infrastructure business and technology for SEPA, cross-border, and instant payments, among others.
About Tareq Shaheen
Tareq is Director of Product Management for Payment Solutions at Eastnets, with over 20 years of experience in fintech. He leads innovation in instant and cross-border payments, ISO 20022, and financial messaging. Tareq turns regulatory shifts into business opportunities and drives digital transformation. He also serves on the board of INATBA and frequently speaks at global forums on the future of payments and emerging technologies in finance.