Back at Money20/20 Europe in June 2019, the last live version of the European event, the hottest areas were payment processing, AML/KYC “AI” and banking/payments as a service. Two years on, whilst processing and X-as-a-service is still hot, a few other areas are coming into focus.

• Everyone wants to build a better, faster, cheaper, dis-intermediated set of rails (maybe using the blockchain, maybe not)
• Open banking is surging with various products and companies are leveraging the capabilities (we’ll share our discussion with the CEO of TrueLayer, the UK’s biggest player, next week). 
• Partnerships. The sector is definitely maturing and whilst partnerships was a new tone two years ago, it’s the go-to-market strategy now for many banks and fintechs.

We’ve also seen a slew of announcements to coincide with the event. Here’s a few noteworthy ones we’ve picked out:

• Arcopay launched a payment initiator across its European markets that enables cardless account-to-account PSD2 payments.
• Comma, a bulk payment system for SMEs, launched at the event. It claims to be the first of its kind in the UK.
• dLocal launched Direct Issuing, a service to enable merchants to issue their own branded prepaid cards for online and in-store shopping. It is designed in particular for use in emerging markets
• TerraPay announced several partnerships to expand its digital commerce platform globally, namely with Network International in the UAE and MOVii in Colombia. 
• TrueLayer announced a $130m raiseat the event, bringing the open banking company’s valuation to over $1bn. Investment was led by Tiger Global Management, with Stripe among the other investors contributing to the round.

Overall, kudos to all the team at Money20/20 for managing to put on a live event. Most players have ducked out of them this year and it’s clear that while is Zoom meetings can be efficient, you can’t replace person-to-person interactions.

Stay ahead of the sector – sign up to our newsletter

Daniel Webber

LinkedIn

Daniel is Founder and CEO at FXC Intelligence. Daniel is a leading influencer in the global payments space internationally. He is frequently invited to speak at industry conferences and provide insights and data on the sector. Daniel is widely quoted across the sector including in The Economist, Wall Street Journal, Reuters and Daniel is also a contributor for Forbes.com. FXC Intelligence's weekly industry newsletter is the most widely read in the international payments market.