Next in Tech | Ep. 243: Money 20/20

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Eric Hanselman: Welcome to Next in Tech, an S&P Global Market Intelligence podcast where the world of emerging tech lives. I'm your host, Eric Hanselman, Chief Analyst for Industry and Company Data at S&P Global Market Intelligence. And today, we're going to be talking about some of the perspectives the team has picked up from the Money20/20 conference. And with me to discuss it are some of the finance team who are here, Jordan McKee, McKayla Wooldridge and Sampath Sharma. Welcome back to the podcast to you all. 
 

Jordan McKee: Thanks, Eric. 
 

McKayla Wooldridge: Thanks for having us, Eric. Happy to be here. 
 

Sampath Sharma: Yes. Thanks, Eric. Great to be here. 
 

Eric Hanselman: Well, we've had a lot of discussions just recently about fintech in various forms. There's a lot that's happening, but Money 20/20 takes it to a new level. What did you see out there? And what should our listeners be aware of? 
 

Sampath Sharma: Yes, I can go first. Eric, this was actually my first time at Money 20/20 Vegas. And I have to say it really lives up to its reputation. It's busy. It's where just about everyone in fintech shows up from start-ups to the biggest names in payments and banking. What really struck me the most, especially as a first timer was how critical the U.S. market is to fintechs around the world. And you could see it in the level of international participation, like so many foreign headquartered companies had made the trip, right? So they were all like very eager to understand how to plug into the U.S. ecosystem or expanded partnerships here. And so in terms of like popular themes, I'm pretty sure Michela, Jordan are also going to agree with me. And 2 themes that really dominated the show floors and all the conversations in the hallways was stable coins and Agent AI. like everyone had something new to show or talk about. And what was interesting is that neither stablecoins nor AI felt like nice to have experiments anymore. So they're all like -- I would say both of them are like table stakes. They're no longer nice to have things to talk about, but they are like the new baseline for innovation. So therefore, the real question is no longer how to build them, but how to scale them and how to commercialize them profitably, right? So -- and another thing that really stood out for me was how traditional players are looking at some of these new technologies to leapfrog and defend their market share. I'll share some of the details for later in the conversation. 
 

Eric Hanselman: Wow. So okay, AI, I can figure, but stablecoins, that's a 0 to 60 moment. I guess all of a sudden, stablecoins are everywhere. 
 

Jordan McKee: They're unavoidable, Eric. And again, we've talked about this in previous podcasts, but it's just incredible the speed at which this technology has entered the industry consciousness, the industry conversation. I was looking back actually at our write-up of the 2024 Money20/20 U.S. show and stablecoins had a couple of passing mentions in that report. We were starting to see the temperature increase around that technology as Stripe had just acquired Bridge at the time. So it was gaining some popularity. But even if we go to the Money 20/20 show that happened in Europe this year in June, stablecoins, again, starting to see more activity in terms of headlining conference sessions and what have you, but product announcements essentially nonexistent. It still felt very formative even back in June. And then as Sampath says at the show this year, stablecoins everywhere, the topic on everybody's lips, seeing actual announcements around this technology hitting the wire. So we are at this point where it's no longer just a topic of conversation. We're actually starting to see real meaningful developments begin to work their way into the marketplace. 
 

McKayla Wooldridge: Yes. And I'll jump in and add to that. As Sampath and Jordan mentioned, stablecoins and even AI really took center stage this year. And this was my fourth or fifth Money 20/20. I don't know I've kind of lost track. But last year, I remember there were some whispers of stablecoins. But what was really interesting to me to hear this year was just how really pervasive they're becoming and there are very many use cases for them as well. So not even just for cross-border payments, but we heard from providers that are seeing stable coins for use cases like accounts payable and treasury management even in the B2B commercial payments realm. So there's a lot of exciting opportunities here. 
 

Eric Hanselman: Wow, this is not only just the buzziness of it, but you're actually seeing broad application and people actually starting to really do stuff with them. 
 

McKayla Wooldridge: Absolutely. 
 

Jordan McKee: And I would say, Eric, to that point, like the broad theme that I feel like I picked up on is sort of this reinvention at the system level. If you think about where a lot of the activity in fintech has been over the past decade, even a couple of decades, it's been a lot of innovation around the edges. And now with stablecoins and especially agentic AI coming into the picture, -- it really feels like they're at the heart of this transformation of this reinvention at the system level. There are these new foundations, these new revolutions in financial services. And in a lot of ways, it almost feels like we're starting to see this replatforming of financial services where legacy rails, legacy processes are increasingly being influenced by these technologies that are bringing intelligence and programmability. So that's what really stood out to me as I reflect back on this year's show is the role of these very foundational technologies and how they could potentially drive this next growth phase in fintech, this next era of innovation in our ecosystem. 
 

Eric Hanselman: Well, in an ecosystem that already was moving pretty rapidly just in terms of the technology shift, some of these transitional patterns that are taking place, no shortage of activity, but I guess that's also a lot of what Money20/20 is about. 
 

Jordan McKee: Yes, it's right. It's interesting, too, this year. It didn't feel like there was a dark cloud sort of hiding in the background as has maybe been the case in previous shows. Michael and I have been to this show where like the meltdown of Silicon Valley Bank was looming over the industry. We've been at the show when fintech venture funding was falling off a cliff. We've been at the show after the meltdown of FTX. There's been a lot of challenge in this industry in terms of the backdrop and even some of the macro context. And again, it just sort of felt a bit more upbeat this year in terms of the overall industry attitude. And I think a lot of that just tying back to this excitement around Agentic and stablecoins and the promise that those technologies hold to really push the industry into the next growth phase. 
 

McKayla Wooldridge: I would agree with that. I think there's a lot of focus on partnerships as well. and less of a competitive tension even with new rails like stablecoin right now, there seems to be a big emphasis on really just payment flexibility. So using stablecoin as another rail for various use cases or even providers that are adding flexible buy now, pay later terms at checkout or businesses accessing orchestration capabilities and multiple processors. There's not really a one-size-fits-all approach. It's kind of a partnership ecosystem that we're seeing. 
 

Eric Hanselman: It takes a village to build fintech. Well, and we've talked a lot about, especially in the stablecoin area about the fact that this is there are all set of possibilities, but you've got to have the ecosystem around it to be able to support it. It is a relatively new area if we start thinking about the full set of financial institutions that are going to be able to go there. I'm curious, was this all blue skies everywhere, just entirely upbeat or any cautionary tails that are out there? 
 

Sampath Sharma: Yes. So it was quite interesting to see how traditional players are looking at stablecoins as a way to transform themselves or do some sort of an image makeover, right, as they continue to face competition and disruption threat from fintechs -- and what is really interesting is how some of the legacy players. And when I say legacy players, I'm talking about companies that were founded in 2008 or prior to 2000, right? And so they have -- we know that over the past few years or so, they've all been experiencing revenue declines. They've been conceding market share to the new age players, right, and largely because of a variety of modern technological trends that are sort of pervading the fintech landscape, right? So we're seeing the likes of core banking players. We're seeing the likes of legacy remittance companies, money transport operators, year after year, quarter after quarter, reporting top line declines on their earnings calls, attracting a lot of broad investor scrutiny. So they are all sort of jumping on the stablecoin bandwagon now and are sort of seeing an opportunity to sort of turn around their businesses. So to take an example, Pfizer, for example, is one company, perhaps the only large company that's left in the U.S. banking landscape, doing both merchant acquiring business as well as selling data processing solutions to banks in the hope that they can -- that it can continue to sort of see or enjoy synergies between these 2 businesses -- but what we are seeing increasingly is that the banking side of business, which has traditionally been seen as a business that is quite resilient to market volatilities, market guidations is also increasingly coming under the competitive pressure. So Pfizer, for instance, has reported declines in its banking technology revenues. Its payment revenues hasn't quite met the Wall Street expectations, and they've sort of cut down their growth projections. So amidst all of this drama and some of these core banking players are sort of now laying up or sort of sending out this message that they are readying up, they are transforming their banking solutions. And stablecoins seems to be -- or digital asset platform seems to be one of the opportunities that they can jump on and where they can aggressively quote banks to transform their traditional businesses. So I thought that was very interesting. And maybe there is some merit to the argument that they could now well leapfrog to the next evolution by sort of investing, ramping up their investments in these digital assets provided that the future turns out plays out in a way that they anticipate. 
 

Jordan McKee: Yes. I'd add to that, Sampath. It almost feels funny now if a company in our ecosystem doesn't have a stablecoin story, a stablecoin strategy, a stablecoin capability. It's almost expected that, that's going to be part of the talk track and conversation for anybody across the fintech value chain. I would also say, because of that, we've seen a number of press releases hit the wire over the course of the past, call it, 3 to 6 months that have lacked a lot in the way of substance. They're saying the stablecoin word over and over, but it's not exactly clear what they're doing with it and how they're embracing it. It just sort of comes across that they feel they need to have a stablecoin message. So I would be cautious of that moving forward, like really look for the meat on the bone in terms of how companies are embracing this technology and really the way in which they're positioning the value that stems from it to their customers. I'd also add in terms of skepticism maybe specific to stablecoins, I picked up on a number of anecdotes around skepticism specific to the consumer opportunity. There's lots of interesting use cases and early product market fit. and other areas we've talked about like remittance and cross-border. But specific to your typical B2C transaction, generally, the sentiment I'm picking up, at least in developed markets is that current generation payment methods, payment rails work quite well. There isn't an overwhelming consumer need or appetite for a new way to pay. We see that message reiterated in our consumer survey data where on the whole, consumers don't quite know what stablecoins are, what value they provide, how they would use them. So I would caution anybody looking at the consumer opportunity in developed markets today to really think about specifically what value are stablecoins driving and what problems are they solving that exist today. 
 

Sampath Sharma: Yes, I agree. I totally agree. I think like Jordan said, we're seeing a number of companies talking about stable coins probably because they just want to be seen as doing something related to stablecoin. And there are clearly examples of companies riding a trend rather than solving a real need, right? And there are like plenty of such cases. But at the same time, like to talk about one good example of a company that could very well sort of undertake a transformation is, say, Western Union. Western Union, for example, we all know that it's been around for nearly 15 years, right? And they have been over the past few years or so, reporting revenue declines -- and now they've recently announced that they are going to be issuing a stablecoin. But to me, the biggest story was not the token itself, but the fact that they could actually make use of their physical brick-and-mortar agent network, right? So Western Union is a company that has like more than 500,000 agents operating across 200 countries. So they can just lean into this pre-existing physical off-ramp, something that most crypto native or fintech players would kill for, right, in cash markets. So I think it's very interesting how all of this could play out. It's not a done deal yet. It remains to be seen whether this will really turn out in a way that it would help these legacy players undertake a digital transformation and turn around their underwhelming growth stories in recent times. 
 

Eric Hanselman: Well, you raised a really interesting point, which is at some point, you have to actually interact with customers, and there is that very large part of the global population that is served in the physical world. So we've been talking a lot about digital. But if we think about unbanked populations, a lot of that potential market around us, there still has to be some place where that transaction takes place in the real world. 
 

Sampath Sharma: Definitely, definitely. So I was talking to someone who -- someone from Singapore, and they were like the very reason why most people would want to probably use stable coins is they simply want to enter the dollar economy, right? So they want to enjoy the benefits of accessing a stable currency. So they're not -- a lot of them are probably not interested in the technology aspects of the stable coin. They may not be interested in the programmability and all the other shiny aspects of a digital asset. They just want to use the stable coin simply because it is the best proxy for a dollar. So -- which is where perhaps building trust into stable coins, building trust into the workflows is very pivotal. -- and which is where perhaps the traditional financial institutions could still aspire to play a role. 
 

McKayla Wooldridge: And I want to build on that, Sampath, because you said something that really rang true, I think, throughout the entire event, and that was the emphasis on trust. So kind of shifting focus over to one of the other big themes throughout the event, AI. I know we were talking earlier about what are maybe some of the dark clouds that emerged. And while there's a lot of excitement and opportunity around Agentic AI, there's also a big concern around fraud. And so as AI gets more advanced, fraudsters are getting more sophisticated. And that's where we saw a big focus on fraud prevention, which we do year after year, but we saw new start-ups emerge in this space as well that are actually using AI to take on AI-related fraud. And so some of those start-ups were IDM, Virtu AI, we also heard from other companies that are just focused on really providing strong technology and also partners that can help businesses not only detect and prevent fraud, but also respond to fraud and make sure that they're monitoring that. So I would say that, that's the other big takeaway from the event is just the emphasis on fraud prevention. 
 

Jordan McKee: Yes. I like that observation, McKayla. I saw something similar specific to Agentic Commerce, where there were announcements that were hitting the wire specific to capabilities that could help businesses basically identify what's a good agent looking to interface with your company and buy products and what's an agent with malicious intent. So we saw announcements from vendors like PRV that launched its verified agent solution. Incode launched a new capability called Agentic Identity. And it all ties back to this trust building equation that's so critical in payments, so critical in financial services more broadly for any of these new technologies to make the impact that they're believed to make, that trust layer has to be there. And I think we're in very early innings on both the Agentic AI side and the stablecoin side of things in terms of putting that foundational infrastructure layer in place. It was encouraging to see some of those start-ups and some of those proven vendors actually focusing on this and trying to help to balance that out. 
 

Eric Hanselman: Well, and if you think about the foundations of any financial transaction are going to be trust, right? To Michael's point, there has to be that foundational element as part of this. We can apply as much stablecoin pixie dust as we want all this, but it's the services that are available and the extent to which people trust them that's going to generate that demand. It's going to identify whether or not the users are actually going to come to it, whether or not that's on the consumer side or on the business-to-business side. 
 

Jordan McKee: That's right. And that trust conversation always finds its way back to identity, which continues to be the biggest opportunity and the biggest challenge facing financial services more broadly. old saying in our industry, once you solve for identity, the rest is just accounting. It's obviously not that simple. Identity is very, very hard to prove, very, very hard to determine. And so we see so much of the energy in our industry focused on capabilities that can better determine identity and really determine the intent behind that identity. Even if we know who this person is or who they say they are, what's the intent? What are they trying to accomplish? And so that continues to be a through line in every Money20/20, new capabilities, new ideas around that identity equation. 
 

Eric Hanselman: What seems there's a lot on the AI side that's been applied to trying to sort out intent in a transaction, ensuring what's actually the behaviors that are taking place. What kind of efforts are being made around establishing identity? Because to your point, it's a challenge in so many places on the planet. 
 

Jordan McKee: Yes, it is. And this is one of the big hurdles that the industry needs to overcome to realize the potential of Agentic Commerce is how do we determine who these agents are that are interfacing with businesses and what their attendance, right? Are they actually good customers? Or are they looking to perpetrate some sort of scam or fraud against a business? And so one of the interesting developments that we've seen on that front is actually a collaboration between Stripe and OpenAI for an open standard, a framework called ACP, the Agentic Commerce protocol, which basically sets out the shared set of rules to enable commerce where AI agents can act on a buyer's behalf and discover a product, initiate checkout, pay still let the business retain control over that transaction. And it was interesting when Stripe and OpenAI made this announcement maybe a month or so ago, there was some, I guess, early skepticism around how broadly this would be embraced by the payments industry, given the fact that Stripe is a competitor to many different types of players across the ecosystem. And at the event, we saw both PayPal and Worldpay make announcements embracing adopting the ACP. So encouraging to see that back to Micheela's point around collaboration and partnerships, this is coming to life around Agentic commerce and players are looking to line up around standardized approaches to solve for identity, enable secure transactions and really build that trust with consumers and businesses. 
 

Sampath Sharma: Yes, I agree. So I think going back to Michael's and Jordan's points about trust and if you tie to the what seems to be but joining AI agentic commerce. So there's a lot of conversations around who's going to own, who is going to sort of dominate the upcoming way of agentic commerce? Is it going to be big tech? Or is it going to be large payment platforms like Stripe? Or is it going to be card networks like Visa and Mastercard, right? So -- but there seems to be a growing consensus that it will ultimately come down to who will become the default trust player for AI agents. So the real question might not be who will come to own payments, but who will actually govern them, right? 
 

Eric Hanselman: Managing the actual process itself. Well, because the governance part of this, I mean, there has to be a legal framework for the transaction. There's all of the other aspects that have to be rolled together. It's not just the underlying technology. There's an awful lot that has to actually encompass and encapsulate all this to make it really work. 
 

Jordan McKee: That's right. It feels like every conversation somehow leads back to Visa and Mastercard in this industry given their pivotal role across the value chain and there's so much conjecture around, oh, technologies like stable coins are going to displace the networks. Actually, when we think about new technologies, there's a need for governance. There's a need for trust, there's a need for identity. The card networks bring so much of that to the table. And that's really how you see them positioning around these technologies, bringing those things forward to provide that trust layer, provide that collaboration layer for the industry. So continue to be very optimistic in terms of how the networks are positioning around these trends and really converting a lot of would be threats, would be displacements into opportunities. 
 

Eric Hanselman: Interesting that sort of absorbing whatever the the attacks are that are leveled against them and in building them into the environment to make themselves stronger. 
 

Jordan McKee: That's exactly right. 
 

Eric Hanselman: Interesting. So where should organizations be looking at a lot of the announcements that were taking place at Money 20/20. And looking forward, what should be looking out for? 
 

Jordan McKee: Yes. I would say a few things to call out there. Certainly, look to us, we'll be producing a great wrap-up report on the show, not only highlighting some of these announcements, but offering some context on what do they mean for the industry? What's the path forward in light of some of these developments as we think about not only next year, but really through the end of the decade. We're in the process of pulling together our fintech outlook report for 2026, which will be out before the end of the year, which, as you would imagine, we'll go deep on Agentic AI and stablecoins in addition to a variety of other topics. So some great perspective on really what to be on the lookout for as we enter the new year. But beyond that, I think it's -- for both of these technologies that we continue to talk so much about, it's really not only ideating on the use cases, but ideating on the sources of value for the customer. And it feels like a lot of that can be missed early on, like what is the customer value proposition? What are we actually solving for? And so that's really what I would encourage participants across the industry to focus on. It sounds so simple, right, but really start with the customer, start with the problem statement and then see how these technologies potentially can back into that. 
 

Eric Hanselman: Other comments from the rest of you? 
 

McKayla Wooldridge: I would say I'm always on the lookout for trends and discussions around B2B and commercial payments. And while the talk tracks at Money 20/20, I've noticed generally don't have a big focus on specifically B2B payments, and that's expense management, accounts payable, accounts receivable. In my meetings, we discussed the applications of stablecoins for use cases like accounts payable and treasury management, also Agentic AI for automating various tasks across accounts payable and receivable and then also how virtual cards are just delivering greater control and visibility for businesses. And I heard from companies like Convera, Conduit, Mastercard, I2C, they're all seeing strong traction in commercial payments. So I think this is a market to pay attention to. There's lots of growth and potential. 
 

Sampath Sharma: Yes. Yes, totally agreed. And on my side, I would say that stablecoins is something that we've been trying to stay on top of. So expect plenty of coverage on stable coins. It's going to be a primer that we're hoping to publish in a month or so. And that will be followed by profiles of various interesting vendors that are streamlining on-ramps, off-ramps as well as building stablecoin-related infrastructure and profiles of traditional players, how they are sort of supporting their existing clients with stablecoin-related opportunities and things like that. 
 

Eric Hanselman: Well, we'll have links in the show notes to point our listeners to a lot of that research, but I appreciate all of the insights from all of you. Let's see how these pan out and where the heck of stablecoins roll to. But it's been great having you all back on, but we are at time for this episode. But thanks for being back. 
 

Jordan McKee: Thanks, Eric. 
 

Sampath Sharma: Thanks, Eric. 
 

McKayla Wooldridge: Thank you, Eric. 
 

Eric Hanselman: That is it for this episode of -- Next in Tech. Thanks to our audience for staying with us. And thanks to our production team, including Sophie Carr, Feranmi Adeoshun, and Kyra Smith on the marketing and events teams. I hope you'll join us for our next episode where we're going to be getting in the holiday mood. Sheryl Kingstone is going to be back talking about a holiday customer experience and a lot of what's going on and what we have to look forward to in the shopping season and the technology that is underpinning a lot of retail and many other aspects. But I hope you'll join us then because there is always something Next in Tech.