Macey Jones
Principal Solutions Product Marketing, Cyber Resilience & Compliance
May 7, 2026
When payments work, nobody notices. When they don’t, everyone does.
In Pakistan, 1LINK keeps that from happening. Formed by 11 leading banks, the company now underpins the nation’s everyday money movement—card transactions, ATM withdrawals, interbank fund transfers (IBFT), bill payments, even government tax collections. In 2025, 1LINK processed more than 10 billion transactions worth PKR 75.4 trillion, while sustaining 99.999% uptime.
That’s national‑scale reliability—and it’s increasingly being fortified with AI.
1LINK isn’t a single product. It’s a mesh of interoperable payment rails, or underlying digital network and infrastructure. 1LINK’s rails switch services for ATMs, IBFT, a domestic card scheme (PayPak), and connections to global acceptance networks like, Mastercard, UnionPay, and JCB. Add to that an open API platform serving 60 fintechs, plus rails that connect banks to 1,150 government entities for tax payments. The result is a backbone that touches nearly every account holder and merchant in the country—often without them realizing it.
That expansive presence means uptime is essential for 1LINK. A blip isn’t just a blip: it ripples across banks, agencies, and consumers.
1LINK already operates clustered applications across primary and disaster recovery sites with continuous monitoring. But classic dashboards are noisy at this scale. For 1LINK, the next step is intelligence that distinguishes signals from status lights—and acts before customers feel impact.
“We intend to have all monitoring be moved to AI-based applications where the application or observability will be improved,” 1LINK Chief Digital & Tech Solutions Azimullah Khan said. “It should automatically detect an anomaly and produce feedback about how systems are behaving.”
The company’s immediate AI mandate is pragmatic: detect anomalies early and guide fast fixes. But it sees a future for other AI use cases, as well.
On the customer side, 1LINK predicts that observability will learn normal behavior across applications, networks, and databases, then flags deviations with context. In other words, a control‑tower model for national infrastructure.
Fraud defense follows the same path.
Banks today rely on rules‑based alerts coordinated through 1LINK but soon will lean on machine learning models trained on rolling six‑month windows to spot subtle patterns to predict the future of fraud. That shift—from reactive rules to predictive models—aims to reduce false positives, shorten investigation time, and cut actual loss without adding friction for legitimate users.
Speed can’t outrun trust—especially with national payment data.
1LINK has been PCI‑DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) compliant for 15 years, encrypting and masking sensitive data at rest, in motion, and at presentation. That heritage shapes its AI roadmap.
“Our AI roadmap should be: first, we implement the PCI‑DSS policies into our own systems using an AI agent; then, we extend AI‑based services to our customers,” Khan said.
This posture also acknowledges a perennial reality: people move, policies evolve, systems accrete. Onboarding new team members can take 12 to 24 months because they must internalize business logic, security policy, and regulatory nuance. Automating repetitive checks and generating security‑aware code scaffolds can shorten that runway and keep experts focused on what humans do best: designing for resilience.
Underneath 1LINK’s rails sits a growing enterprise data warehouse that aggregates transaction telemetry. Today, it powers internal analytics; tomorrow, it could provide secure, bank‑specific insights-as-a-service: peak payment days, decline patterns, downtime diagnostics, and more—exposed via dashboards or agentic “ask‑your‑data” interfaces.
“We intend to offer this data as a service to our member banks,” Khan said. “A second step would be to provide them some sort of agentic AI experience where they can query their own data using an agent.”
The model could open a new revenue stream for the banking and financial services industry at large. For 1LINK, there are two caveats: never commingle customer data, and never compromise controls.
For over two decades, 1LINK and local partner Synergy have navigated platform shifts from Sun servers to modern security modules. After performance and support issues with a prior storage vendor, 1LINK standardized on Hitachi Vantara.
“We never faced any downtime [with Hitachi Vantara],” Khan stated. “The platform is very stable and that’s what we needed.”
As AI‑ready platforms and cyber capabilities come into scope, that mix of local expertise and global engineering will remain pivotal, as well.
When it comes to maintaining a competitive edge through innovation, organizations within the banking and financial services industry would be wise to follow 1LINK’s example, with a strategy like the following:
With AI driving modernization in all areas of the banking and financial services industry — but especially in payment rails — organizations can expect faster anomaly detection, tighter fraud interdiction, and development lifecycles where compliance is a continuous, automated property rather than a late‑stage gate.
“The whole process will be changed in the next 5 to 10 years,” Khan predicted. “People will use AI rather than writing SQL queries or asking employees to generate reports.”
Over time, secure data services will help banks see—and solve—performance and customer‑experience issues earlier. A predictive, compliant, and quietly effective future.
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For over a decade, Macey has brought cybersecurity solutions to market that help organizations achieve their mission without barriers. She’s held product marketing leadership roles at both Fortune 500 companies and startups – including BlackBerry Cybersecurity and Thales – where she helped launch the industry’s first data protection-as-a-service offering. At Hitachi Vantara, Macey leads Global Solutions Product Marketing for Cyber Resilience and Compliance, helping IT and security teams achieve predictable risk reduction.
