I’m on my flight back from Las Vegas and thinking about how to encapsulate the highlights of Money 20/20. Its third year was the biggest yet, capped at 7,500 people (not counting the Fire Marshals patrolling the hallways). At many conferences I’m able to distill several distinct themes; this time, the overwhelming impression was the emphasis on … PARTNERSHIP Celent's been talking about the need for banks (and others in the ecosystem) to partner better for quite a while. At Money 20/20, the word was on everyone’s lips. Discover, Visa, and a host of others mentioned their eagerness to team with other members of the ecosystem to drive more activity in ways that are better, faster, and/or cheaper. Some other random observations:
- The big four U.S. banks sent an average of 40 attendees, with the high being 55 and the low being 30.
- MCX said that CurrentC is in pilot with merchant employees in several cities, but missed the chance to show us a demo. And as an interesting counterexample to the partnership theme, Visa told us that they “look forward to MCX presentations so that they can learn what’s going on.” I’ll stop there.
- Customer Experience continues to be a big theme
- There was way too much emphasis on Point of Sale terminals – and why does every POS terminal still look like it came from 1985 (Poynte and Clover being two exceptions)?
- What happens when there is no Point of Sale, like with Uber? (Incidentally, I wish I had a dollar for every time someone has used Uber as an example over the last twelve months – I’d be on my way to Tahiti)
- Facebook is doing some really interesting things on the commerce side: if they identify a group of profitable customers who have a certain profile (e.g., mid 30s, likes dogs and hiking), they can go find other Facebook users with the same profile.
- Security, as always, was a hot topic
