We often say that Money20/20 is so big and diverse that if you asked a 100 different attendees for their key takeaways, you would get a 100 different answers. It depends whether one spent more time in the sessions, in meetings, or walking the exhibit floor. Personally, I feel that I get the most out of the event if I do a combination of all three, although lately I found myself spending more time in 1-1 meetings. This year, I was again joined by my colleague Kieran Hines, and afterwards we realised that between the two of us we had 80+ conversations over the two- and a-bit days! Just before the show, we published a report called A Future of European Payments: Getting Ready for a Seismic Shift in Commerce. By the way, you can still download this report even if you are not a Celent research client, either via Celent or via our partners at Tietoevry. Not surprisingly, we wanted to take the opportunity to discuss our findings with the industry, and, as always, each conversation added further richness and colour.

So, here are my top 10 takeaways:

• Digital wallets are evolving and increasingly facilitate not just card transactions but also account-to-account (A2A) payments, something which will be a key factor that will help drive A2A payments adoption beyond account top-ups and other me-to-me transactions. One example of that was an announcement that Revolut will be joining EPI and supporting its Wero wallet.
• The industry clearly recognises that technical connectivity is not enough to drive adoption of open banking payments; a commercial model and scheme-like rules of engagement are critical. Visa and Mastercard are well placed to bring their expertise into this domain, and Visa announced the latest additions to its Visa A2A service, aimed at bringing card-style consumer protections to A2A rails.
• We saw growing appreciation how useful open banking connectivity can be to support credit decisions.
• Lending is also an increasingly attractive use case for players focused on embedded finance.
• Solving for digital identity is essential to bring trust into the ecosystem. EU Digital Identity wallets are expected to play a transformative role in payments and beyond.
• Fraud more broadly remains a big focus for the industry, with AI driving much of innovation to ward off the most advanced threats, such as deepfakes and scams.
• The buzz was back around digital assets, and especially stablecoins. As the use of stablecoins grows, interoperability with fiat rails will become increasingly important. Merge, a London-based fintech, is well placed to capitalize on the opportunity, having announced that they now hold an Electronic Money Institution (EMI) licence and are registered as a Virtual Asset Service Provider (VASP).
• Agentic commerce promises to redefine how consumers shop online. The speed of development is incredibly fast, and it won’t be long before the topic moves off the conference stage into the exhibit floor showcasing real-life applications.
• All this change requires flexibility and agility that banks stuck with legacy card and payments processing platforms struggle to achieve. I spent quite a bit of my time talking to technology providers - traditional and next-gen - to better understand their capabilities and how they help clients to transform. One of the announcements that caught our eye in that space was FIS partnering with Episode Six to launch the FIS International Issuing Hub, “a fully cloud-native ecosystem designed to help banks and issuers modernize their payments infrastructure and bring innovative products to market, fast.”
• Another challenge for banks is that they increasingly want to integrate with the expanding fintech ecosystem, but the partner onboarding process is onerous and takes far too long to meet their existing compliance, risk, and legal requirements. While many of these requirements are there for a reason, finding a better forward is rapidly becoming a priority for many.

Congratulations to the Money20/20 team for yet another fantastic event. And thank you so much to all who took the time out of their busy schedules to meet with us, we really appreciate it. Until next time!