Euromonitor attended Money 20/20 Europe in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, on 4-6 June 2024. This large-scale conference featured many insightful discussions and bold claims. Several speakers highlighted the disruptive impact of artificial intelligence (AI), while adding that businesses should be intentional in building their AI strategy. Europe’s economic sovereignty was brought up as one of the key priorities by the region’s bodies for payments regulation. Payment tokenisation was identified as a key technological driver supporting security and convenience in consumer payments.
AI for fintech: Bold promises of an intelligent future
AI was widely discussed at Money 20/20 Europe by speakers from major technology companies, AI start-ups, and financial institutions. Kevin Levitt, Director of Financial Services at NVIDIA, suggested that the financial services sector is among the best positioned for AI implementation due to a successful track record of technology adoption in the industry. He added that the pace of innovation in the sector will continue to accelerate rapidly while AI adoption is now still in its early days.
Patrice Amann, EMEA Business Lead for Financial Services at Microsoft, added that text-to-speech, image recognition, and chatbots are among key AI-enabled tools to benefit the sector. He also claimed that the use of AI needs to be augmented by human input in order to ensure compliance in a highly regulated payments sector.
Arthur Mensch, CEO at Mistral AI, made a similar point and said that his company advocates keeping the human in the loop when implementing AI solutions in order to retain control over the behaviour of tech.
Lastly, both Marnix van Stiphout (COO at ING Bank) and Joanne Hannaford (CIO at Deutsche Bank) both agreed that generative AI is a true game-changer for fraud prevention and detection. According to van Stiphout and Hannaford, financial institutions will need to address the issues of scalability to reap the benefits of AI by making smart decisions about how, when, and where to implement AI in their operations.
CBDCs: An addition, not a replacement
Several discussions at Money 20/20 were centred around the topic of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). Evelien Witlox, Director of Digital Euro at the European Central Bank (ECB), claimed that securing Europe’s financial sovereignty in a volatile world is a key objective of launching a eurozone CBDC. She added that peer-to-peer transfers, in-store payments, and e-commerce would be the key use cases for the digital euro. Witlox claimed that the digital euro would feature “privacy by design” and that the ECB and European Commission’s vision for the digital euro is providing consumers with an alternative means of payment rather than replacing cash or other existing payment modes.
While there is noticeable progress in digital euro design from the technical perspective, its implementation is not imminent, because the draft legislation on the digital euro is yet to face several steps of the EU’s legislative procedure.
Payment tokenisation: The backbone of frictionless payments
Jennifer Marriner, EVP of Acceptance Solutions at Mastercard, and Alexa von Bismarck, President of EMEA at Adyen, underscored the impact of embedded payments on consumer behaviour. By implementing tokenisation, which replaces sensitive card details with unique tokens, and utilising embedded checkout systems, merchants can simplify transactions, reduce friction, and enhance security, encouraging consumers to complete their purchases.
Additionally, the integration of passkeys and biometric authentication, such as fingerprint or facial recognition, was highlighted as a means to significantly improve the checkout experience by making it faster and more secure.
US-based payments giant, Visa, has made several major announcements on the topic of tokenisation: according to the company’s data shared at the conference, a whopping 29% of payment transactions currently processed by the company use tokenisation. Visa also shared its vision of AI-enabled data privacy controls for tokenised payments where users would obtain full control of their payment data by directly managing token access within their banking app.
This year’s Money 20/20 Europe was full of optimism about technology, which offers an outlet of growth during the current challenging times for Europe’s economy and security. The conference also showed that the fintech sector is now fully embracing partnerships. No longer are start-ups seen as disruptors, nor big financial institutions or banks as slow, mighty hegemons. Instead, the fintech sector is now an intertwined net of services that complement each other’s value propositions through engaging in “win-win” collaborations.
Our predictions for this year’s Money 20/20 Europe were summarised in this article, published in June.
Please also read our series of strategic briefings on embedded finance which discuss driving factors, key products, and cross-border transaction applications, providing insights for financial institutions and non-financial businesses to explore strategic partnerships in this space.