AI-Powered Cybersecurity Mesh for Financial Transactions: A Generative-Intelligence Paradigm for Payment Security

The rapid expansion of digital payment channels has significantly widened the financial transaction attack surface, exposing ecosystems to sophisticated, polymorphic threat vectors. This study introduces an AI-powered cybersecurity mesh that unites Generative AI (GenAI), federated reinforcement learning, and zero-trust principles, with a forward-looking architecture designed for post-quantum readiness. The architecture ingests high-velocity telemetry, coordinates self-evolving agent collectives, and anchors model provenance in a permissioned blockchain to guarantee verifiability and non-repudiation. Empirical evaluations across two production-scale environments—a mobile wallet processing two million transactions per day and a high-throughput cross-border remittance rail—demonstrate a 95.1% threat-detection rate, a 62% reduction in false positives, and a 35.7% latency decrease compared to baseline systems. These results affirm the feasibility of a generative cybersecurity mesh as a scalable, future-proofed blueprint for next-generation payment security.