Celent analysts were on the ground at the Venetian in Las Vegas this week for a peek at the present and future of payments, banking, and fintech. Nearby, the Wizard of Oz continued its month-long run at Sphere amphitheater.
While there, we had over 50 meetings with clients and new and old friends, learning, advising, and updating our general view of the industry. Topics included how incumbents will compete against newer digital banking and payment platforms, an uptick in US go-to-market advisory for some of our international clients, and the 2026 Celent Model Bank Awards, which are now open for nominations.
The main topics across the show? Agentic and Generative AI, and Stablecoin. Relative to last year’s wall-to-wall discussions of Rule 1033, this year that topic was only in the background and required a bit of digging to explore.
Several conversations helped reinforce my view that the main driver of Generative AI’s widespread excitement is that nearly every line of business envisions some degree of benefit from the technology. Unlike any single previous technology advancement of the now 30-year-old Internet age, all bank leaders can look over the rainbow and see opportunity, potential efficiency, or some other pot of gold from GenAI-powered capabilities.
Celent has closely profiled Generative AI from pilot projects and production use cases in financial services across every step of the value delivery chain. At Money 20/20, it was clear that Generative AI has melted “into the background”. It powers just about every innovative fintech solution on offer – practically table stakes.
Across the event, perhaps less universally than Generative AI, the stablecoin conversation and related opportunities dominated a large part of the conference chatter. The place and value of stablecoins, especially those that will be based on USDC, came into sharper focus. One example is Fiserv, who has launched their FIUSD initiative, in combination with their recent acquisition of Stone Castle. Through FIUSDC, Fiserv expects to offer a new bank-friendly capability for instant, cross border, and frictionless payment, while also providing a more efficient depository network for their client institutions and service providers.
We spoke with FIS about their newly acquired team from Amount, exploring how Amount’s DAO and origination capabilities will augment the advancing Digital One roadmap. Plaid shared with us a vision for their expanding set of credit decisioning tools.
In customer engagement innovation, there was an interesting announcement from Starling Bank (UK) and Google on a collaboration for customers to detect fraudulent offers right within their digital banking app, powered by Gemini. Although I must admit it was tough to envision much scale behind adoption and usage, not least because of unknown volume of these types of situations (a customer willing to step out of a purchase journey and engage their banking app to validate a product or seller).
As always at Money 20/20, there was plenty of fun and many colorful characters on the expo floor. Doc Brown and the DeLorean car from Back 2 the Future, A Paul Revere actor on a horse (at Plaid), and many more. And in a welcome addition from Money 20/20 Europe, incredible “doughnut boards” every day. But it did seem noticeably less crowded than in recent years, and several attendees noted as much to us. Perhaps the overlap of November’s F1 race preparations disrupting Strip traffic and surrounding streets have become too much of a headache for some in the past 2 years.
Completing the Wizard of Oz vibe, the Emergent Stage featured Aiana, a six-foot wide emerald-green glass cube, which provided the audience spoken summaries of the day’s events, summaries of earlier session transcripts, and general information about the conference. Although not quite the “Wizard”, Aiana’s gentle female voice was indeed prompted by a man-behind-the-curtain, who steered it through the conversation by uttering prompts into a microphone. This all felt completely welcome and normal. My thought as I watched the next session was, of course there will be a voice or text companion to nearly every professional group conversation we have from here on out – even if only to summarize our important points afterwards.
