Money 20/20 roundup: The future of fintech in an AI-powered world

AI dominated the conversation of this year’s Money 20/20 in Amsterdam – especially agentic commerce, where AI agents can be used to autonomously buy on behalf of consumers. 

A lot of airtime was given to how AI can be used for operational efficiency. How the large-scale adoption of agentic commerce hinges on consumer trust and industry regulations. How AI can turn digital identity into currency. 

Attending so close to home, I left energized by the bold ideas and fresh thinking from the leaders and visionaries shaping the future of money. Since it was founded over a decade ago, Money 20/20 has always been where the most influential voices in banking, payments, fintech, and commerce come together to define what’s next. 

I was particularly proud to see my colleagues at Checkout.com on stage, sharing what it takes to build the people and products that help us continue to be where the world checks out in a complex industry that’s thoroughly embracing AI. 

Keep reading to discover my key takeaways from this year’s event. 

Identity as the ultimate currency: From vision to reality

Our VP of Product, Milan Jani, sat down with Docusign’s Senior Director of Identity and Strategic Technology, Thibault de Valroger, for an electrifying discussion on how digital ID is set to reshape commerce, why consumer trust is key to adoption, and what it will take – technically and culturally – to make this vision a reality. 

Together, they were clear in their view: the future of payments will be digital ID. With rising fraud, growing consumer demand for convenience and security, and merchants’ need for security and revenue, it’s the only way forward. 

The vision? A world where your identity is your wallet. No cards, no passwords and clunky authentication – just smooth, secure transactions verified in real-time. It might sound futuristic, but we’re already heading there. 

We recently built a Digital Economy Trust Index where we surveyed over 18,000 consumers across 16 countries. We found that 60% of Gen Z believe digital ID will be their main payment method in the future. 

The challenge: Trust and the consumer psyche 

Money has always been a function of trust – whether shells, coins, or credit cards. But today, money is more abstract than ever, moving across borders at the speed of light. The missing piece? A smooth way to verify who’s transacting, not just what. 

Taking strides towards this future doesn’t come without its challenges. Fraud is at an all-time high. Trust in digital transactions is under siege. Businesses and governments grapple for certainty in who they’re dealing with. Consumers are constantly asked to prove who they are. The question looms: How do we build trust? 

While the latest digital ID developments are advancing fast, adoption hinges on how comfortable people feel storing their IDs online, using biometrics, and navigating risks like deepfakes and racial bias in facial recognition. 

Are consumers ready to embrace using digital ID as a payment method, or wary of what it means for their privacy? Our Trust in the Digital Economy report reveals what consumers really think:

• ⅓ of all under 45s are already using biometrics to verify transactions
• 48% (54% of Millennials) believe that merging ID verification with payments would be the key to making them feel more secure when transacting online
• 43% would like to have a digital ID wallet
• Nearly 50% say deepfakes are a serious personal safety concern to them 

Building the tech to make it happen

As fraud and deepfakes grow more sophisticated, knowing who you’re doing business with online demands robust technology. In just five years, the proportion of fraud attempts involving deepfakes has multiplied 15X. That’s why AI-powered solutions like Checkout.com’s Identity Verification (IDV) are vital. 

Security is at the core of the conversation around digital ID wallets. There’s a critical need for watertight verification standards. Weak security doesn’t just hurt individuals, it undermines entire digital ecosystems. 

The question is no longer if identity will be the future of payments – it’s how soon we can make it a reality.

The multi-trillion-dollar B2B embedded finance opportunity

There’s a massive B2B opportunity in embedded finance. Checkout.com’s Chief Product Officer, Meron Colbeci, joined Visa’s Head of Commercial Solutions (Europe), Lucy Demery, for a fireside chat unpacking the topic. 

With B2B embedded payments growing 20–30% annually, the session explored how integrating financial services directly into business platforms is transforming digital commerce, opening new revenue streams, boosting conversion, and deepening customer insights. From BNPL to virtual cards and agentic AI, early adopters will help define the future. 

“Embedded payments is about integrating financial services more seamlessly into wider digital and physical life – to make payments and access to capital more intuitive to the businesses that we serve”. Shared Lucy.  

Meron gave a perfect example of embedded finance in action. You’re into running and on the hunt for sneakers to improve your time. You find a pair, go to checkout, but you’re short on cash. Suddenly, your favorite BNPL provider pops up offering a loan or installment plan – right at the point of purchase. 

How does this drive value? It creates a better customer experience, allows providers to make smarter decisions using contextual data, and gives merchants a new revenue stream and better conversion rates. 

But BNPL isn’t the only service category that’s relevant here. Meron and Lucy also discuss other examples of embedded finance, such as embedded cards, investments, and insurance, to name just a few. 

The rise of agentic commerce

As Meron noted, it wouldn’t be a tech or payments conference in 2025 if AI, specifically agentic commerce, didn’t come up. And so the conversation turned to its impact on embedded finance – which Lucy believes will transform everything from operations, procurement, and payments, to fraud management, financing, and working capital. 

They covered the consumer upsides of AI agents acting as autonomous personal concierges: convenience and time-saving. 

But, as Lucy and Meron discuss, this raises a challenge: what does identity mean when the shopper is by definition not the cardholder? It requires trust, but there are still concerns around trust and privacy – what happens if an agent buys something a consumer didn’t want? Trust is ultimately the fuel that will drive agentic commerce’s success. 

There is hope, though; it’s about building on earlier phases of innovation and security standards. Lucy pointed to Visa’s progress, building its agentic commerce solutions on its tokenization technology – used in most European Visa transactions. 

Still, a key question remains. What happens to traditional ecommerce touchpoints like pricing, shipping, and return policies that may or may not be relevant for an AI agent? Agentic commerce is just beginning. While it’s an undeniable opportunity, it’s also a potential threat; the industry hasn’t set the key paradigms in place yet. Early movers will help shape its future. 

“I like to think that there are stages of commerce – commerce > ecommerce > mobile commerce > and agentic commerce could be the next evolution that we see.” Meron added.

Incorporating embedded finance 

Embedded finance is the great unbundling of financial services – a huge opportunity for businesses, but you must think about what use cases are applicable for your business. 

Businesses thinking about incorporating embedded finance should consider:

1. Is the service you want to offer a true value add to the customer?
2. Can you and the vendor you want to use truly create a smooth experience that respects your brand?
3. What is the regulatory landscape, which is inherently local? 

Regulating for innovation in payments: challenge or opportunity

Regulation should enable better outcomes for merchants and customers – not be the goal itself. 

That was the message from Checkout.com’s General Counsel, Emilie Mathieu, during a panel on evolving governance models and regulatory changes in payments.

The panel balanced optimism about regulation as a driver of innovation with realism about its limitations and unintended consequences. Are regulators truly prioritizing innovation when driven by consumer protection and market stability? 

PSD2 and the upcoming PSD3 are clear examples of regulations stimulating innovation by legitimizing new market entrants and providing shared infrastructure, all while protecting consumers. But Emilie stressed: regulation works best when co-designed with the industry and focused on real outcomes. Misalignment can stifle innovation.

At Checkout.com, performance and fraud prevention are core to our strategy – delivering better merchant results and supporting regulatory objectives like fraud reduction and consumer trust. 

As countries are increasingly introduce standalone payment systems, like Brazil’s PIX or Saudi Arabia’s Mada, operational resilience increase – but so can complexity for global merchants. That’s why PSPs must be hyper-local and work closely with regulators in each market.

The best regulations leave room for innovation; they don’t try to prescribe it. At Checkout.com, we’re already incentivized to innovate for performance, but we need the space from regulators to be able to do this.

The CMO’s guide to genuine traction in fintech 

In fintech, building standout products is just the start. Making them resonate? That’s the real challenge. 

Checkout.com’s CMO, Rory O’Neill, joined a panel of fintech marketing leaders to share how to build traction in an industry defined by complexity, regulation, and constant change. 

How do you cut through content and product orverload to reach the right customer? How do you distinguish key performance indicators from vanity metrics? 

Being a marketer, I’m clearly biased, but I couldn’t agree more with Rory’s statement about how to inspire trust in 2025: it depends on the generation. What builds trust for Gen Z differs from Boomers. They interact differently with the digital economy. As tech evolves – from in-store cash to online payments to AI and agentic commerce – so must the fintech industry’s trust strategies. 

“There are great brands that spend a lot of their marketing investment working with great partners like Visa and Mastercard to put trust in the ecosystem, because in our world, if the consumer doesn’t trust the system, there is no commerce, so we have to make sure that trust is fundamental.” Rory stated.

On today’s biggest CMO challenge? Talent. Finding it. Developing it. Keeping it – especially as AI reshapes marketing roles. His advice: partner closely with your Chief People Officer. Because employer brand, authenticity, and value proposition – all critical to the talent lifecycle – are core marketing disciplines. External and internal brand are separate entities of one brand.

And in a world obsessed with performance metrics and ROI, Rory’s case for investing in brand is the idea of relative differentiation. Choosing what your brand will be famous for, sticking with it, and playing the long game. It may not bring instant ROI, but it’s where the value lies. 

Finally, on regulation, Rory reframes it as a customer-first opportunity. Regulations are there to protect customers. And we want to be on their side. That means collaborating with regulatory teams early – ensuring marketing campaigns align with both compliance and creativity. 

Is financial services ready for agentic AI?

“For the long-term future, it’s clear that the IT department sort of becomes the HR department. There are a bunch of digital employees [AI agents] that need to be maintained, onboarded, guardrailed, just like humans, and they need to work with each other. [...] So we’ll need agentic AI factories. [...] And this will lead to a huge economic impact in a very positive way.” Shared Jochen Papenbrock, NVIDIA’s Head of Financial Technology and Lead DevRel Banking (EMEA). 

Joined by industry leaders from Visa and Bunq, they discussed the rapid rise of agentic AI in financial services. Bunq shared how AI agents have transformed its operations, notably by handling close to 80% of its customer support tickets autonomously. NVIDIA and Visa emphasized the emerging AI infrastructure, the need for security and trust in AI-based commerce, and the shift toward AI “factories” – digital workforces that assist humans. 

The conversation also highlighted use cases in fraud detection, KYC, climate risk modeling, and hyper-personalization, underpinned by strong data foundations and orchestration frameworks.

The key takeaways?

Infrastructure and governance are critical: For agentic AI to scale, organizations need strong orchestration layers, secure data pipelines, identity verification systems, and AI centers of excellence to manage models and compliance.

“Fundamentally, you have to address three things: security, consumer content and control, and privacy. Because we’re leveraging data, and so you want to make sure that the consumer has full understanding, control, and access to the data.” Stated Mathieu Altwegg, Visa’s SVP for Products & Solutions. 

Training AI agents, measuring their outputs, and improving them requires a new operating framework. It requires what NVIDIA has coined an “AI factory”. 

A digital workforce is coming fast: Within 1–5 years, expect AI agents to handle tasks across banking, commerce, and risk management. These agents will increasingly interact with each other and customers, supported by modular, efficient AI platforms. 

Trust is foundational to fintech’s future

Throughout each talk I attended at Money 20/20, there was an invisible thread: trust. In a world where trust is gained – or lost – in milliseconds, how can it not underpin everything we do as an industry? 

Whether that’s consumer trust in digital ID as a payment method, in AI agents doing their shopping, or in their data being used transparently, our industry can’t function without it. 

We’re an industry of disruptors and innovators. We embrace change, both technologically and culturally. Just look at the vision for the future of payments built on AI mapped out in this roundup. We’re just over five years on from the start of the pandemic, and look how we adapted to the way it changed payments – accelerating the decline of cash and the incline of digital wallets, shifting more consumer spending online, catapulting BNPL’s success. 

Behind it all are PSPs like Checkout.com, perfecting digital payments so that consumers don’t have to know who we are. When payments work, consumers get a great experience, businesses get paid, and trust is maintained.