Revolutionizing Finance: Payhawk’s New AI Agents Transform CFO Operations

We're going to check in with the latest headlines from Europe and the Middle East with Polly Jean Harrison, features editor of the FinTech Times, and she joins us from across the Atlantic this morning.

Good morning, Polly and happy Friday.

Thank you so much for joining me.

So payha. is rolling out its fall 25 product edition, enhancing its AI office of the CFO suite with 4 new integrated AI agents.

So we've been hearing about these AI agents.

Tell us more about the system and how it benefits businesses.

Good morning, Rey.

Absolutely.

So these new agents for financial control of procurement, travel, and payments from Payhawk are really designed to complete everyday finance tasks by following the rules, policies, and approvals already established by a company's finance department.

So this system is going to allow employees to make requests in natural language, after which the agents will then guide them through the entire process, collecting necessary approvals in the background.

So according to Payhawk, the agents are designed to learn user preferences over time as well in order to be able to complete tasks faster and with less manual effort.

So you know this is hugely exciting, I think for a lot of reasons, and every agent is designed to handle very specific finance. workflows which in turn will, you know, free up time for staff and other people to in theory, you know, make businesses work better and smarter.

So the financial control agent is intended to speed up the month end closing process by automatically chasing receipts, uploading documents from vendor portals, plugging anomalies, and escalating reminders.

And Payhawk reports that with its agent expenses are submitted twice as fast.

The procurement agent employees.

The procurement agent allows employees to state what they need in natural language, which will then gather context, apply budget and policy rules for its approvals, and can increase card limits or create purchase orders, reducing that need for manual forms and any other things like that.

And then of course the travel agent handles bookings, ensuring that they were within company policy and based on user preferences, and then the payments agent functions as an automated help desk, providing instant answers on issues like failed transactions, blocked cards. or pending reimbursements.

So this is all about how reducing work for your human staff, giving it to your artificial intelligence AI staff, and then helping these things move on and workloads move smarter and in theory just make businesses just operate so much easier.

So a really exciting thing to see.

It'll be great to see how this sort of interacts with businesses as we move forward and great to see this in process as we move into the rest of the year.

So yeah, very exciting for Payhawk.

Well, Polly, I do want to shift our focus on over to digital assets.

So I understand Bito has obtained an extension of its license from Germany, and this approval does enable the company to expand its European services to include regulated crypto trading.

So tell us more about the license.

Yeah, absolutely.

So this extension for Bitco enables European institutional investors to use Bitco's over the counter trading desk and electronic trading platform for spot trading across thousands of digital assets and stablecoins.

So according to this announcement, investors will have aggregated access to dozens of liquidity sources, including market makers and exchanges, allowing them to trade at competitive prices.

So this is an extension of the markets in crypto assets regulation license that Bitco Europe first received from Buffin in May 2025.

So with this addition, Bitco Europe now offers a comprehensive suite of regulated crypto services including custody, staking, transfer, and trading.

And of course the key aspect of this new offering is the ability for clients to trade while their assets remain in cold storage under compliant regulations.

To custody.

So the integration of this high performance execution with institutional grade security is designed to give institutions the confidence to operate safely and efficiently in the digital asset market.

So again, hugely exciting for Bitco, something, you know, crypto assets and digital assets is something that is just always a hot topic and especially to see a new license coming in, or rather an extended license coming in, it's always really exciting and does a really great thing.

Things for the industry and you know Bitco Europe is really one of the few regulated custodians in the region offering that cohesive full stack platform that encompasses custody, trading, staking, and settlement.

So this, I think, is really exciting and something that will hopefully help empower institutions to deploy capital more efficiently without compromising on security.

So again, just really great news coming out of the digital asset space today.

OK, Polly, as always, thank you so much for bringing us the latest FinTech headlines from across the Atlantic.

Have a great weekend.

Thanks, Ray.

See you next time.