It’s Day 1 of the international travelling roadshow that is Money 20/20 and the European iteration, held at the cavernous RAI exhibition centre in Amsterdam, is on a mission to the outer edges of the conference stratosphere in terms of scale and size.
Seriously, some of the exhibitor booths are bigger and much more expensively furnished than my apartment (I’m looking at you Banking Circle).
And the effort and imagination that goes into the show and all of it’s myriad moving parts, is nothing short of spectacular.
To whit: as I type this, a DJ is spinning tunes and a rapper (who may or may not be intentionally bad) is spitting lyrics.
Why does a Fintech conference need a rapper, you might be forgiven for asking?
Paraphrasing Sir Edmund Hilary, when asked why he climbed Mount Everest, the M20/20 crew might respond by asking: what is the point of having a Fintech Conference WITHOUT a rapper?
And you’d be left stumped and slope away, feeling like a square.
Suffice to say, the bar is set high.
The Open Banking Summit
Morning 1 was all about Open Banking with the ‘Open Finance Summit’.
Simon Taylor of Sardine, and formerly of 11FS, needs no introduction to Fintech or Open Banking nerds, kicked things off sharing findings of a recent Open Banking survey from the UK.
A panel discussion at Money 20/20
The results were all a little bit meh, to be honest, and illustrated, once again, the untapped potential of Open Banking is being stymied by a lack of investment from banking incumbents.
This was perfectly illustrated in ‘The Future Of Open Banking’ panel discussion where Zak Lambert of Plaid, perhaps the single biggest Open Banking winner thus far, highlighted how a major bank was able to increase their customers eligible for an overdraft by 16% on day 1 after introducing Open Banking to establish credit worthiness.
The panel, moderated expertly by Simon Taylor, emphasised that with Open Banking, now running in some capacity in 90+ countries, isn’t going anywhere and demonstrates a movement to a personal data economy to benefit consumers globally.
The stark difference in Open Banking adoption in countries where a prescriptive, top-down model (like Europe and Australia) has been introduced versus those countries, like Brazil, where banks have been incentivised to come to the party was also highlighted.
Are financial services ready for Agentic AI?
Literally standing room only at the A.I Summit as esteemed guests from Visa, Bunq and Nvidia discussed A.I Agents and how they differ from Agentic AI – seems odd, but apparently there is a difference.
Gen AI moved toward Agentic A. in the last two years, representing a huge shift from ‘machine learning’ to genuine AI.
Ali at Bunq explained how Agentic AI is now deployed across several departments at Bunq, but with human supervision.
They’ve developed agents to assist customer support – now 80% of all customer support tickets are handled by agents, and well-received by customers.
His key message to those yet to determine their AI agenda or strategy: don’t wait – get started. Fail fast and often.
The goal has to be clear and the outcome measurable. Then you can scale. Trust is a non-negotiable. Guard-rails around the agents without compromise on interference.
Future panel predictions
Agent-to-agent communication
Economic power of Agentic A.I – it’s more than just a buzzword
Agent toolkits
Guard-rails to protect against early-version agents
Digital workforce working alongside a human workforce.
Actionable insights
Tokenisation is a must for payments agents
Authentication will be critical
Consider creating an internal ‘A.I centre of excellence’ to manage and oversee models running in production. This then sits on top of your Agentic A.I ‘factory.’
A.I governance and regulation over your own models
Interoperable compute platform to run agents in the cloud and also on-prem (where necessary)
Summary
Day 1 of Money 20/20 Europe in the bank.
It’s hectic, it’s busy, it’s expertly curated and, if you’re a Fintech nerd like me, it’s a tonne of fun.
Merch count:
3 x t-shirts
7 x socks
1 x hoodie
3 x caps
