Scott duFour, Corpay Chief Information Officer, lays out how the company is embracing AI-driven innovation to enhance efficiency, customer service, and cybersecurity.
In this episode of Smarter Payments by Corpay, host Brennan Robison, Director of Corporate Communications, welcomes Scott duFour, Corpay’s Chief Information Officer, to discuss the evolving role of AI in payments and IT operations.
duFour shares how Corpay is leveraging AI across multiple business lines, focusing on enhancing customer service, improving risk management in cross-border payments, and strengthening cybersecurity. AI is also playing a key role in IT operations, helping automate security measures, streamline development processes, and optimize customer retention efforts.
The conversation also covers the growing focus on hyper-automation, where AI and other technologies are expected to revolutionize back-office processes such as billing and finance. duFour emphasizes that AI’s role at Corpay is not to replace jobs but to improve efficiency, allowing the company to scale effectively without increasing operational costs.
Security remains a top priority, with Corpay closely monitoring how cybercriminals are using AI for social engineering attacks. The company is investing in AI-driven security tools and employee training to combat emerging threats. Additionally, compliance efforts are evolving, particularly in credit products, as regulations become stricter.
Looking ahead, duFour highlights Corpay’s priorities: continuing to evolve its product offerings, integrating AI-driven insights, navigating regulatory challenges like PCI 4.0, and attracting top IT talent.
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duFour tease bite: We all know generally, it's cheaper to keep a customer than it is to get a new customer. And so, we've looked at our data and tried to look at trends to say, hey, where are maybe some disenfranchised customers and how can we re-engage with them before they decide to leave us.
Robison intro: Using AI to predict customer behavior, just one of the topics in this episode of Smarter Payments by Corpay. I’m Brennan Robison, Director of Corporate Communications at Corpay, and today we’re joined by Scott duFour, Chief Information Officer at Corpay, to talk about the latest trends at the intersection of technology and payments…. Here’s our conversation.
Robison: Hey, Scott, welcome back to the show.
duFour: Thanks, Brennan. How are you doing?
Robison: Good. So, when we last spoke to you, the topic was the challenge of IT budgeting. Well, today we want to zoom out to the wider trends, challenges and opportunities facing IT professionals. First, what is the single hottest topic for IT professionals such as yourself right now?
duFour: Yeah, I'd say probably not a big surprise to a lot of people. It continues to be a lot of, let's say noise, lot of discussion and topic around AI and the evolution of AI and how we can better incorporate it to help not only back-office efficiency and on our customer support and service side, but also, integrating it with insider products.
Robison: Certainly, AI enters into just about every conversation no matter the topic these days. Can you give any specific examples of how Core Pay is using AI in its core business operations to enhance efficiency, customer service?
duFour: Yeah, we took this year to do several things relative to AI. One is, as you know, we're federated across multiple lines of businesses, all with kind of different product and even technology footprints. And so, one of the first thing we want to do is think about how we can leverage all the individual work that was going out there across our individual lines of businesses. So, we had an enterprise level, we kind of created some think tanks and groups to share learnings, to share technology advancements we've made in our different areas. And that's really helped us to propagate, better propagate some of the stuff that's, you know, organically happening out there, not necessarily from a top-down perspective. And with that, certainly we've seen advances. Number one, I'd say probably the hottest or most popular has been in the area of customer service and support, from tools to help aid our customer service agents to tools that we're integrating into our websites and chatbots and even into our mobile apps. That's been an area where say there's a lot of technology but there's a lot of use cases out there that we're able to leverage and even technology we're able to leverage from third-party vendors along with things we've done ourselves. So, that's been a fertile area for us to go ahead and without a lot of cost integrate and drive value with inside of our business and let's say the other areas where we're starting to look, I'd say, more deeply on is with inside of our products ourselves. So, we've done some things inside of our maintenance business to help recommend to customers upcoming service or maintenance based on history. We've done things inside of our cross-border payments business to help customers assess and manage risk. And so, there's just things we've been doing in that area. I'd say small things that we're continuing to gather momentum with, and I think that'll be a continued growing area. And then lastly, I'd say it's on the IT side, right? So, my group in and of itself leveraging AI to help us first and foremost is in the area of security. A lot of our vendors have adopted AI tools that were developed AI tools that were then incorporating in our overall security posture and architecture. And so, we've leveraged it there and then leveraging it quite frankly with inside of our development and engineering teams using tools such as Microsoft Copilot, doing things around our leveraging AI for automated testing to help improve the quality and increase the life cycle for overall development. So, really kind of a broad base of things we've been doing with AI over the past, let's say 12 months and look forward to doing more in 2025.
Robison: Sure, you noted the integration of some of the technology across the various lines of business, which as you mentioned are in kind of a federated model, sort of in silos and you're trying to break some of those down. There's a well-publicized effort to integrate some of the sales across the lines of business, especially in the US. How does IT tie into that effort?
duFour: Yeah, So, separate from, certainly, our sales, and I'd say not just sales, but sales and marketing tools, and hey, how can we better streamline some of those tools and integrate and standardize, or even more importantly, look at where some lines of business have been more successful with those tools than others. I'd say that's number one. The other area would be in and around data and even AI, right? So, when you think of the sales process leads data, external data to help us, enclosure rates and the like has been. Obviously, is a key success factor to the overall sales organization. So, looking at how we can better ingest data and better integrate data into that overall sales process has been a focus point that we can look at enterprise type solutions, even though the lines of businesses are targeting potentially different customers and different solution sets. But there's areas there we can develop some common technologies that can be leveraged. Let's say lastly, although it's technically not sales, but it's interesting that a couple lines of businesses looking at taking, looking at how do I reduce attrition, right? Because we all know generally it's cheaper to keep a customer than it is to get a new customer. And so, we've looked at our data and tried to look at trends to say, hey, based on history, based on previous customers that are traded, where maybe some disenfranchised customers and how can we re-engage with them before they decide to leave us? And so, we've been successful leveraging data along with some AI and machine learning tools to help drive and improve that key metric for us. So, not technically sales, but it's customer attrition, and it's kind of the same group.
Robison: So, while preparing for our conversation, I came across a term that was new to me, hyper-automation, defined as using technology to automate and streamline business processes. Keeping with that AI theme, what is Corpay doing in the realm of hyper-automation?
duFour: I'd say as you start to look, I've seen and read some of the similar articles, when you look at hyper automation, it's looking at some of your back end say back-end office processes, it might be billing, finance, customer service in those areas. I wouldn't say we've implemented anything yet. Certainly, one of the, I'd say, areas that's ripe for opportunity in that space is in some of our billing processes, right, as we continue to grow and get bigger, processes that have been relatively manual in nature are now becoming very time consuming. And at times when we get, you know, spikes driven by different business activities. It can even impact our networking capital and our cash position. So, there's some certainly definitive business benefits beyond just, I need fewer people, but also, helping some of our financial metrics in that area. So, that's certainly an area we'd like to look at adopting some of that technology in.
Robison: So, speaking of people, what are the implications of AI for staffing? Will Copay’s IT processes require fewer people, or will the skill set of IT workers just evolve as AI becomes more prominent?
duFour: Yeah, I'd say two areas when we talk about staffing, certainly when you look at the area of customer service, it hasn't been, know, it's really for us because we're a growing company. It's been about, how do we scale more cost effectively? Right. So, it's not necessarily been about, hey, let's put in AI and let's get rid of people. But it's more been how can we better leverage AI to accomplish two things? One, improve our net promoter scores, right? So, our customer satisfaction. And then secondly, how can we not hire more people and get better OPEX leverage as our businesses continue to grow. So, that's a good position to be in. So, everyone's very positive. There's no fear around the technology, right? It's all positive in terms of how is AI helping me to be more efficient as a worker and how is it helping me better satisfy my customers. In the area of technology and engineering and the like, one I mentioned security sets, hey, how do we, you know, increase the number of security cases that really we're dealing with in an automated fashion. Again, it's a scale thing. We don't have to hire more security ops people. Fewer cases need to be looked at by individuals and they can manage things by exception. And then on the engineering side, it's really the productivity of our engineers and the quality, right? And so, some of the metrics we'll look at is, you know, reduced amount of defects as we get through our testing cycles. So, the more that we can leverage AI to help us in test automation, help us in test data automation, at the front end of our engineering practices, right? We have fewer issues at the backend of our testing integration, which... the age-old adage, it's a lot harder to fix a defect, know, three steps down the process than it is at the front end of the process. So, we become more efficient and we generate higher quality code and products.
Robison: Once data came across, over 40% of network outages are caused by misconfigurations. I'm kind getting out of my lane using that word, but AI, it is said, provides the promise of reducing network downtime due to misconfiguration to near zero. Can you share anything about that?
duFour: Yeah, that's not an area, I've read similar things. It's not an area we've delved into just yet. Maybe it's because the network outages haven't been a pain point for us. So, we tend to focus our investment in technology and our time in areas that are important to us. Unfortunately, that hasn't been a big challenge for us, but certainly leveraging AI to look at not only your local area networks, but even at your external networks and looking for trends and packet losses and things like that to start to help route traffic around in those areas. We would probably in that space really look at how our vendors are adopting that, right? And that's both the vendors we use for our internal networks as well as the vendors we use for our external networks and see how we can leverage that as opposed to anything we would develop internally.
Robison: Sure, you mentioned cyber security and with the bad guys getting more sophisticated and how they can try to do harm. What is Corpay doing specifically in that realm? Shoring up its defenses to protect sensitive financial data.
duFour: Yeah, I'd say a couple things there. It's interesting. It's one, we have to look at how are the bad guys using AI, right, to try to get a foothold inside of Corpay. And so, you know, that's a matter of following industry trends and making sure a lot of it revolves quite frankly around social engineering and how they're using AI in the social engineering space. So, there's a lot of education back to our employees, right? We see people leveraging AI to get data amongst our executives and then trying to use tools such as WhatsApp and other social networking tools to trick employees in terms of giving over key, whether it network access, even at certain times, bank account numbers, right? AI need to do wire transfer and things like that. That used to just be via emails, right? Now you're seeing them using AI to get really good data, personal data executives and on people in the company and then use that data to try to socially engineer our employees. So, in that space it's a matter of understanding those trends and what people are doing and then doing some good education. And certainly, on our defenses side I'd say the security vendors in general have been kind of at the forefront of leveraging AI to help develop their tools. So, they were some of early ones, even I'd say even before things became really hot and popular in the news cycles around AI. So, we've been leveraging AI in that space for quite a while, looking at different things, whether it be bot attacks that we're getting, whether it be email campaigns that are getting more sophisticated, and in spaces like that just to help protect ourselves.
Robison: And all Corpay employees know that sometimes we'll get emails that look a little fishy and we all get to click on that report the fishing button and it…
duFour: That's right.
Robison: A screen pops up saying congratulations and that's always very satisfying. So, since Corpay’s product solutions do include credit products, and those are regulated as far as how you have to disclose credit decisions, how is compliance evolving as processes become more automated?
duFour: Yeah, I we do a lot of work when you look at credit and the credit process. We do a lot of work around and know your customer, right? We have to deal with issues not only around the regulatory and reporting and there's some upcoming legislation around, think it's 1070 or 1071 where the government wants us to do even more reporting around smaller businesses and our decisions around those smaller businesses. So, there's things we have to do relative to an enterprise level on how do we collect that data and report it back to the government. But there's also, things around fraud, right, that we have to do, you know, just customers trying to defraud us around the credit process that we have to do technology investments in and try to generate, as you mentioned, further automation in that process. There's been discussions of AI in that process and how do we do better jobs So, we can maintain our efficiency and get through all of the different applications we get without all of them requiring human touch. it continues to be an area of focus for us from across a multitude, not just a regulatory perspective, but a fraud perspective as well.
Robison: Very good. Well, so, to wrap up our conversation, if you would tell us again, as the top information technology officer of a global payments company, what is at the top of your agenda as you work to further the company's business goals.
duFour: Yeah, it's hard to pick just one. Certainly, from a business and shareholder perspective, how we continue to evolve our products to drive the growth of the company is a top topic for us. And in a federated model, there's several different major initiatives that we look at there, whether it's from acquisition integration, partnerships, development of our products. Those are all things we're doing. Certainly, from a regulatory and compliance perspective, PCI 4.0 goes live this year. That's a big compliance thing for us as a FinTech company. did the bulk of that work in 2024 to get prepared, but there's ongoing things we have to do from a... just the bar has been raised, right? It's a higher, the new standard has higher regulations and requirements. And so, that's something we're preparing for as an organization. We prepared for as an organization 2024 and 2025, the rubber hits the road as we start to get measured and assessed and analyzed. So, I'd say that from a regulatory and compliance perspective. And then, there's always the ongoing talent more, right? How do we continue to drive the satisfaction of our employees and our engineers and how do we win that talent war to make sure that we have a top-notch organization to help us in our endeavors.
Robison: All right, well, we thank you for your time and your insights. Scott duFour, Chief Information Officer at Corpay. Thanks, Scott.
duFour: Thanks, Brennan.
That's it for this episode of Smarter Payments. Thank you for listening. Be sure to follow the show wherever you get your podcasts, So, you don't miss an episode. Smarter Payments is a production of Corpay Incorporated, copyright 2025. I'm Brennan Robison. And we'll see you next time.