Money20/20 USA is back with this year’s show – taking place from 22 to 25 October in Las Vegas – promising a jam-packed four days to explore what’s next in the world of money.
Taking over the famous Venetian resort in Las Vegas, the US edition of ‘where money does business’ welcomes 300 industry leading speakers to join the fray from companies all over the world to deliver an agenda of more than 60 hours of thought-provoking content.
Monday 23 October brought a full day of insightful conversations on fintech and the hot topics surrounding it.
An exclusive insight
First up was the “Fintech State of the Union” by Discover Global Network, where Jordan McKee, research director, 451 Research, a part of S&P Global, Tom Brown, partner & general counsel, Nyca Partners; and Katelyn McCarthy, VP, payment services strategy & business development, Discover Financial Services, sat down to discuss this years state of the union research study, providing an exclusive first look at some of the emerging trends shaping the fintech industry and how companies can find success in the evolving ecosystem.
During the discussion, Brown said: “The old fintech can’t come to the phone right now, because it’s dead. And we’re at the sort of pivot point between what fintech was for roughly 12 to 14 years, to a new era. The technology that people were driving, going back to when Jack Dorsey introduced a dongle that you can plug into your iPhone and accept our transactions anywhere – it’s completely different and unrecognisable. So I think for various reasons, it doesn’t make sense to apply the label that we developed in that period to what’s going on now.”
A tech renaissance
Next up, looking at a trending topic not only in fintech but the wider world right now, was the panel “ChatGPT can write, but can it underwrite?” The panel of fintech experts take a look at how leaders use AI successfully and assess risk in a new way, providing lessons for all lenders on how to avoid becoming obsolete.
The panel was made up of Maik Taro Wehmeyer, CEO and co-founder of Taktile; Sarah Hinkfuss, Partner, Bain Capital Ventures; Seema Amble, partner, Andreessen Horowitz; Matt Mollison, chief data scientist, Branch International; and MacKenzie Sigalos, tech correspondent, CNBC.
Mollison said: “There’s two main things that drive push me away from using Chat GPT for underwriting and that’s that we’re not in control of the data that’s been trained on. And we’re not in control of like the model itself. we don’t know all the parameters land, the model, the architecture, you want to know the architecture, the parameters, and be able to explain the predictions that it’s making. It’s definitely a blackbox model that we’re not quite sure what it’s doing behind the scenes.”
Early access
Elsewhere at the event, Money20/20 also announced it is launching Twentyfold, a fintech intelligence subscription platform helping investors and partners to speed up the deal and partnership sourcing process.
The Early Access launch of Twentyfold is available exclusively to Money20/20 USA customers in Las Vegas, and subsequently commercially available to the global fintech and investment community on 1 January 2024.
Twentyfold’s search, sort, and filter functions, built on Money20/20’s fintech taxonomy, help potential partners and investors to efficiently organise a future deal pipeline. The discovery engine finds startups with similar characteristics to existing fintechs, and finds founders with similar success records. Twentyfold also has a built-in AI tool called ‘Fin’ with chatbot functionality, helping members to find what they’re looking for via natural language search.
“For more than a decade, Money20/20 has been the place where the world’s fintech start-ups and scale-ups come to find funding, partnerships and growth. Twentyfold expands our mission to be the place where money does business, giving members every piece of information they need to know in one place, with ultra-detailed founder, funding, tech stack, partnership, and investor information for more than 80,000 fintech companies globally,” said Tracey Davies, president of Money20/20.
