Reflections on emerging payments tech at SXSW London

At Checkout.com, we’re proud to have been founded in London. We call Shoreditch our home – it’s where the majority of our team is still based today. It’s not just our hometown, but a hotbed of fintech innovation. That’s why we just had to be at SXSW London, the technology and creativity conference that’s taken place in Texas since 1987, but came to London for the first time ever in last week. 

I was delighted to host the SXSW London Fintech Conference Track in the middle of the week, sharing my perspective on the payment tech landscape today, and introducing some of the industry’s brightest minds.

The week-long knowledge fest highlighted a host of truly exciting new uses of artificial intelligence, payments technology, and fund management tools – to name just a few initiatives. AI is opening new doors across the industry. From bots consolidating pension pots to intelligent tools reshaping banking services, such futuristic tech is already transforming customer experiences.

Here are my main takeaways from the week:

Fintech is the true disruptor to legacy banking

It’s a truth which we’ve long suspected, but saw confirmed once and for all at SXSW London: fintech companies are drastically changing what customers can do with their money. Just two decades ago, the average person had to wait their turn to speak to a bank advisor for the simplest of fund transfers. 

Today, digital payments companies like Checkout.com provide the platforms for real-time payments, giving rise to speedy transfers. In the age of very large online platforms, where everyone carries a smartphone and cash payments are almost a memory, user expectations pivot quickly. In the last quarter of 2024, the Central Bank of Brazil’s instant payment system, Pix, accounted for nearly half (47%) of all non-cash payments in Brazil. That may not seem too revolutionary – until you recall that Pix launched in 2020. 

At a panel entitled “The Payment Revolution”, Klarna CEO and Co-Founder Sebastian Siemiatkowski opined that fintechs are challenging the dominance of traditional banks. How? Online financial services apps provide easier and more favorable funds management options than legacy banks. It’s hard to deny that when the global buy now, pay later (BNPL) market size is predicted to increase by nearly 70% between 2024 and 2030.

Crucially, this overhaul in the banking sector is fuelled by a focus on the consumer – their needs, their experience of the application interface, and their desire to manage their own funds. 

It’s simple: success in the digital economy means putting the customer first. 

Payment tech is shaping the way we buy online

There’s never been a more important time for a conversation about the future of finance. Fintech is the engine of a much bigger transformation: the rise of the digital economy. From how we shop and earn, to how we save, invest, and trust, technology is reshaping every interaction we have with money.

The pace of that change is only accelerating. We recently surveyed over 18,000 people across 16 countries, and the signals are clear:

• 92% of people globally now identify as online shoppers.
• 17% of Gen Z around the world shop online every single day.
• And in the UK, 61% of parents say their children shop online, with a quarter of those kids already using their own debit cards.

We’re not talking about niche behaviors. These are the new norms. And they’re redefining what consumers expect from the financial services that underpin them.

Tackling the challenge of winning customer trust 

At Checkout.com, we built a Digital Economy Trust Index to understand how that trust is built, or lost, across different regions, age groups, and technologies.

What it tells us is clear: trust isn’t just an emotion, it’s infrastructure. And it’s now the number one factor driving loyalty, adoption, and growth across digital commerce. Because digital adoption is high, yet confidence isn’t always keeping pace.

• 66% of consumers say payment performance is the number one driver of trust online.
• In the UK, over half of consumers say they’ve abandoned a purchase due to concerns about payment security.
• And nearly 40% globally have already experienced fraud leading to payment details theft.

This is the tension at the heart of the digital economy: greater convenience brings greater complexity, and, for consumers, greater risk.

And that’s where fintech steps in: to deliver the speed and simplicity people expect, while safeguarding the systems they rely on.

So, what do consumers want? They want things to work – fast, securely, invisibly. And they don’t want to know how it works. They just want to know that it will. That kind of confidence doesn’t come from complexity. It comes from trust.

And trust isn’t a given in the digital economy. It’s earned through performance, consistency, and the quiet reliability that lets users focus on what they’re doing, not how the tech behind it is functioning. That’s why the best fintech today often isn’t the most visible, but it is the most trusted.

How Monzo is scaling trust with AI 

“Most customers feel anxious about their money.” That was the starting point Monzo’s CEO, TS Anil, shared – and the driving force behind its mission to build a better bank.

At SXSW, Monzo gave a masterclass in how to earn trust at scale. Its approach? Co-create with customers, speak plainly, and keep learning. The app now serves 12 million users, and over 600k business customers, fuelled by constant feedback from a 40k-strong Monzo community.

AI is a core part of that journey, but not in ways you might expect. “It’s not about how we’ve saved costs. It’s about how we use AI to build a better product for our customers,” TS shared. Today, that includes using AI to fight fraud, and proactively surface products that help customers manage their money, and anticipate the problems customers want solved next – a challenge Monzo, and other fintechs, are already embracing.  

Building the future alongside AI 

AI was everywhere at SXSW London, and with good reason. AI tools are already assisting with everyday work. And compared with just 18 months ago, today’s AI models are faster, more efficient, and capable of more complex tasks. 

Once prone to hallucinations (making stuff up), large language models are becoming more accurate with targeted Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), which draws on information from an additional – often proprietary – data repository. This provides useful context to the language generator, resulting in answers which are grounded in those data. 

That means you can ask an AI assistant to retrieve information from a huge set of documents. When an AI program completes tasks such as research, comparison, validation, and analysis, it’s clearly more sophisticated than a fancy search engine. 

For example, at Checkout.com, we're using RAG to help our merchants easily access information about our payments products and services, drawing on our existing technical documentation and help guides.

The tech industry has moved beyond the era of fantasy MVP demos, with AI-powered products ready to reshape how businesses operate. 

Agentic AI: When your virtual assistant carries out tasks for you

So-called “agentic AI” refers to an AI program that can carry out tasks that would usually be done by a human – it can even go shopping for you.

Another example of agentic AI is Deep Insight from Luminance, whose CEO Eleanor Lightbody spoke at a panel on the uses of AI in the software as a service (Saas) sector. Launched on the day of the panel, Deep Insight analyzes both a company’s entire contract portfolio as well as government updates and regulatory announcements to answer questions like “What is the impact of this tariff on my business?”

When your business is multinational, and highly sensitive to political and trade-related updates, then the usefulness of a specialized AI agent quickly falls into focus. To support this, the UK Financial Conduct Authority launched a Supercharged Sandbox in partnership with NVIDIA, promising to give firms experimenting with AI access to better data, technical expertise and regulatory support to speed up innovation.

Connecting applications to large language models

How you configure your AI systems will make or break their usefulness. 

As Sebastian Siemiatkowski, Klarna CEO and Co-Founder said on stage, “Put rubbish in, get rubbish out,” (OK, he may have used less family-friendly language than this). He was referring to the classic principle in data analytics: the quality of your data (input) informs the quality of your results (output). He described how this aspect of LLM technology spurred his company to consolidate its sprawling data repositories. 

More broadly in the AI tech space, the Model Context Protocol (MCP) is the new standard enabling engineers to build agents that interact across systems. Akin to an API (application programming interface), which may, for example, connect your web shop to your inventory management software, the MCP guides engineers on how to integrate data sources with LLMs.

The spirit of innovation, combined with a deep focus on customer needs, will define the next chapter of AI-powered financial services. Payments can’t fall behind. They need to perform – invisibly – across this new hybrid world. 

Payment apps are innovating for inclusion – and creator collaboration

“They say money makes the world go round, but in my head, it’s imagination that makes the world go round.” Inspiring words from Idris Elba, who’s launching the Akuna Wallet to empower African artists and musicians to engage in the global creative economy. During a panel discussion alongside Creative Technologist Manon Dave, Akuna Wallet Managing Director Kwadwo Owusu-Agyeman, and others, Idris explained the digital payments app would serve the unbanked population of the African diaspora, and enable creatives to transact, earn, and invest in their growing careers. 

Beginning in Ghana, where the project is backed by the country’s central bank, the Akuna Wallet platform will use blockchain technology (but not cryptocurrency) to ensure creative individuals can receive payment from financial backers, managers, and partners overseas. It’s hoped the Akuna Wallet will reduce the time it takes to fund music marketing, for instance, which can face delays due to poorly connected cross-border payment systems.

It’s an exciting project during a time of growing fintech adoption on the African continent. The penetration rate of the fintech sector in Africa was forecast to double between 2020 and 2025.

“We’ve decided to sandbox it in Ghana for now, it’s a very healthy creative environment. In the future I’d love [the Akuna Wallet] to be known as the creative wallet across the world,” said Kwadwo. “Africa is an early adopter of a lot of tech. Ultimately, there is a wall in getting [creative work] out there and monetizing it.”

This was just one of many examples of how purpose-driven, passionate technologists are bringing financial inclusion into reality. 

Trust, transparency, and talent will define London’s fintech future 

London is still one of the world’s best places to build in fintech. But that position isn’t guaranteed. The discussions at SXSW highlighted both the opportunities and the risks. Wise’s decision to move its listing to the US was a timely reminder that geopolitical conditions affect investment.

For London to stay ahead, it must continue to attract world-class talent – particularly in AI, data science, and payments. And it must remain a place where fintechs can innovate safely, with regulators moving at the pace of the market.

AI, cloud, and data analytics are reshaping every part of financial services. And the Financial Conduct Authority’s role – enabling controlled experimentation and innovation – will be critical as London competes globally. 

We need to be willing to take smart risks, and to learn fast from what doesn’t work. That’s growth. 

But progress must remain human-centered. What’s exciting about technology is how it changes customers’ expectations, and the way they interact with their money. Consumers, rightfully, have every interest in how their data will be called upon and transferred across AI-powered systems. As technology providers, we must make every effort to clearly communicate the meaning, purpose, and value of each use of customer data.

Across the fintech ecosystem, we must build for performance. That means tolerating risk. Learning fast. Moving forward. Because the cost of standing still is too high.