Money20/20 Europe 2025: Key trends and developments

Money20/20 Europe 2025 convened June 3-5 in Amsterdam, gathering approximately 7,500 attendees from more than 2,200 fintechs, banks, technology vendors, investors and other industry stakeholders. This year's conference was united by the theme "create the future" — a nod to the growing role of frontier technologies such as AI and stablecoins in reshaping the financial services landscape. This report highlights our observations from keynotes, panels, announcements and more than 20 meetings over the course of the conference.

Money20/20 Europe 2025 showcased the financial services industry balancing bold experiments with stubborn realities. "Pay-by-bank" remained in the spotlight, yet our conversations revealed it is still an alternative rather than a successor to cards: Reliability gaps, clunky user journeys and thin consumer incentives — not regulation — are now the chief brakes on mainstream adoption. A parallel theme centered on European payment sovereignty. We saw enthusiasm for domestic wallets and account-to-account rails, and even progress toward local schemes interoperating — an ambition that underscores regulators' push for strategic autonomy. Cross-border payments remained an investment magnet and a policy priority. New platforms and bank-fintech alliances sought to collapse settlement friction, while stablecoins drew heavy panel traffic as a potential payout rail — although most agreed the technology is still formative and its hype outstrips live usage. Finally, generic AI chatter gave way to agentic AI this year. Packed sessions debated the future of autonomous financial agents, with proponents predicting that institutions will soon manage fleets of specialized agents for diverse business and customer-facing use cases.

Pay-by-bank activity continues, but it remains a work in progress

Open banking and pay-by-bank featured prominently in the content tracks this year, and there were several announcements from large banks on this theme. UK-based Token.io, a provider of infrastructure for account-to-account payments, announced at the show that it had secured HSBC as a strategic investor, while Deutsche Bank AG's Merchant Solutions unit announced a partnership with Mastercard to give its European merchants a pay-by-bank option at checkout (i.e., Request to Pay).

However, our impression from the sessions and from conversations at the event was that open banking remains a work in progress when it comes to paying for goods and services in the UK, and it will likely remain an alternative to card payments rather than a replacement. Additionally, it will not be suitable in all use cases. During a merchant-focused pay-by-bank panel, the head of payments at online homeware retailer Wayfair Inc. positioned open banking as more of a "backup method" for taking payments. A representative from Booking.com echoed these sentiments, noting that consumers require incentives to move the needle on pay-by-bank adoption. Multiple panel discussions at the event highlighted that open banking is no longer primarily limited by regulatory challenges but instead by reliability, consumer trust and user experience.

Local payment methods attract attention

Local payment methods (LPMs) were a common theme of discussion at the event. European LPMs such as Bizum S.L. in Spain, Polski Standard Platnosci Sp. z o.o.'s BLIK in Poland and Blue Code International AG in Austria are mobile-based or account-to-account (A2A) payment methods with a notable feature in common: They do not run on Visa or Mastercard networks. Despite plans by Wero (the payment product of the European Payments Initiative) to create a pan-European digital wallet, we got the impression at Money20/20 that domestic, locally specific wallets are here to stay. Wero was present at this year's show, sponsoring a coffee cart and announcing that Revolut Ltd. had integrated the Wero wallet for customers in France, Belgium and Germany, but was otherwise elusive.

Christian Pirkner, the CEO of Bluecode, delivered a keynote on the concept of "payments roaming" for LPMs. This would allow users of a local wallet to connect to other payment methods while traveling. For example, a Bluecode user could scan an Alipay QR code while traveling in Hong Kong and make a payment from within their Bluecode app. Bluecode appears to be intentional and ambitious about LPM interoperability, having announced a partnership with Discover in 2024 to support its efforts to scale acceptance around the world.

We also noted growing calls for European payment sovereignty at Money20/20 this year. With regulators and politicians growing increasingly uneasy about the dependence of the European payments market on large, North American card networks and tech companies, there has been a groundswell of support for promoting home-grown European payment methods. One announcement at Money20/20 that felt like a sign of the times was the launch of STELLA, a pan-European, private sector initiative to create a dual-network card that runs first and foremost on a local card network, but which offers access to and interoperability with Visa and Mastercard networks when necessary (e.g., when the cardholder is traveling abroad). Belgian issuer-processor and banking-as-a-service provider ByQwest is spearheading the initiative. It is not clear at this stage who the other participants are, but we found the concept of multi-local scheme cards to be compelling.

Cross-border payments remain an industry hotspot

Cross-border payments emerged as a priority for industry collaboration and innovation at Money20/20 Europe 2025. Irish cross-border payments processor Nomu Pay attracted attention by announcing a $40 million investment from SoftBank Group Corp.'s SB Payment Service Corp. unit, highlighting investor confidence in cross-border payments platforms capable of streamlining complex payment corridors, particularly in emerging markets.

Another notable development was a multiyear strategic partnership announced between Deutsche Bank and Transfermate Ltd. This collaboration aims to enhance Deutsche Bank's corporate payment capabilities in the Asia-Pacific region, integrating local payment collection, disbursement and treasury management services into one cohesive platform. This partnership represents a practical example of banks seeking fintech alliances to overcome long-standing inefficiencies in cross-border liquidity and payment reconciliation processes.

Additionally, financial services software giant Fidelity National Information Services Inc. and Episode Six Inc. introduced the International Issuing Hub, a cloud-native solution that simplifies real-time issuance and management of multiple card products across various international jurisdictions. This product launch aims to address the complexity and costs associated with issuing and managing cards across borders.

While stablecoins were the subject of well-attended conference sessions, product announcements were essentially nonexistent, underscoring the formative state of the technology. However, we were intrigued to see a collaboration between Chinese cross-border payments vendor LianLian Global and UK-based stablecoin platform BVNK Digital Assets Ltd. The partnership will see LianLian Global bring stablecoin payments to merchants in over 100 countries to fund cross-border transactions. A theme in our conversations was the potential value of stablecoins for payout use cases, especially in markets characterized by currency volatility, such as Venezuela.

In the conference hall, we noted the highly visible presence of cross-border payments specialists. Messaging from these providers centered on the ability to power business outcomes through streamlined global connectivity. For example, Terra Payment Services (Netherlands) B.V.'s TerraPay's booth touted "global money movement, simplified," while TTMFS Singapore Pte Ltd.'s Thunes positioned itself as the "smart superhighway to move money around the world," and Custom House ULC's Convera described its capabilities as "cross-border payments built to accelerate business."

Agentic AI becomes fintech's new frontier

Each year, certain themes dominate the content agenda at Money20/20, and while AI has been unmissable for several years, this year the focus shifted to agentic AI. The topic was a mainstay in the keynotes, with Stripe Inc.'s CTO noting that roughly 700 apps are live with the Stripe Agent Toolkit released last year. Meanwhile, Klarna Bank AB's chief marketing officer emphasized the AI culture across the organization, noting that Klarna's AI assistant is handling two-thirds of the company's customer service chats.

The panel with perhaps the strongest attendance at the event was titled, "Is financial services ready for agentic AI?" Participants from NVIDIA Corp., Visa and Dutch neobank bunq BV debated deployment readiness, compute access and ethical guardrails for autonomous financial agents. Bunq's CEO said agents are handling 80% of its customer support tickets autonomously today, and that there are 30-plus agentic AI initiatives live within the company, including in areas such as customer onboarding and transaction monitoring. One interesting concept surfaced by the panel was the notion that the IT department will evolve into an HR department for AI agents. Panelists emphasized the need to track and measure the success of agents, with a representative from NVIDIA hypothesizing that there will one day be dozens of agents per customer within a financial institution.

While announcements on the topic were limited, we were intrigued by news from embedded lending provider Liberis Ltd., which unveiled "Ada," a real-time underwriting agent. We were also intrigued by card and ID provider Austriacard Holdings AG's launch of an anti-money-laundering offering that harnesses multiple agents to analyze transactions and surface money laundering patterns.

Gain access to our full news .& research coverage and the industry-specific data that informs our insights

This article was published by S&P Global Market Intelligence and not by S&P Global Ratings, which is a separately managed division of S&P Global.
S&P Global Market Intelligence 451 Research is a technology research group within S&P Global Market Intelligence. For more about the group, please refer to the 451 Research overview and contact page.