This week sees the return of the biggest Fintech event in the European Calendar: Money20/20. If you don’t know already, Money20/20 is one of the world’s leading, premium content, sales and connections platforms, with a focus on the global money ecosystem and the fintech industry. They host yearly events in Europe, Asia and the USA, that are usually well-attended by professionals from across the world of financial services.
Known for creating a multi-day event like few others, Money20/20 has received an additional boost by taking place in a physical venue, with real-life fintech professionals in attendance. After more than a year of virtual or Zoom-based events, attendees and speakers alike have a spring in their step as they look forward to taking advantage of all of the benefits that face-to-face interaction offers.
Here at The Fintech Times, we will be bringing you a daily summary of the best bits from all the different stages, along with regular updates from the companies in attendance, and the breaking news stories as they happen.
The Details
This year’s Money20/20 Europe is taking place in Amsterdam from 21st – 23rd September, and expects to have over 4,000 people (many of whom are Executive or Board level) and more 1,500 companies in attendance.
The agenda for this year’s Money20/20 was split up into a number of different themes.
The what: Creating products you can’t imagine
The who: Defining a new cast
The how: Developing a regenerative gene
The where: Designing an intelligent environment
The what next: Finding problems for solutions
So, let’s take a look at some of the key highlights from day one of the event!
Key Headline Events
After only just one day, there have already been numerous interesting and informative events, but here are a few of the key ones:
First up, we have “How do we make the point of purchase the trigger for a cascade of other, more interesting, interactions?” Part of “The what: Creating products you can’t imagine” series at Money20/20, Sanjib Kalita, Guppy CEO & Money20/20 Editor in Chief, moderated this event, which featured Daniel Marovitz, Senior Vice President, FinTech, Booking.com as the headline speaker.
This talk focused on looking at how it is possible to turn a payment, from a moment of transaction, into a long-lasting relationship. And, as the Senior Vice President at one of the largest global e-commerce companies, Daniel Marotivz was able to offer his own very unique perspective on the importance of the experience with the financial elements of their platform in building a significant relationship. Daniel also took the time to share how his organisation develops new products, whilst looking to continuously add value to the user’s experience with the platform.
Next, we had a discussion hosted by Karen Tso, Anchor, CNBC Europe, that featured Paolo Bertoluzzo, CEO at Nexi as the main speaker. In this event, they explored the question of “How do we compete in highly consolidated industries?”
Organisational and product roadmaps have to serve your business goals. How do you align them if your goal is to become the largest paytech player in Europe? With the completion of SIA acquisition, Nexi will fulfill its dream of becoming the largest payments group in Europe. Since 2016, the company has been on an ambitious journey of acquisitions and ruthless focus on becoming the largest, most specialized company in end-to-end payment management across Europe. But in payments, competition is never over. At a scale of over 2.4 million merchants and over 160 million cards managed, the CEO of Nexi is divulging the hallmarks of competition and key factors of success in one of the most crowded sectors in the financial services industry.
Finally, we have “What would cross-border trade with zero intermediation look like?” The speakers on this panel covered a wide range of industry areas, and brought with them a wealth of experience. They included Jed Rose, General Manager for EMEA, Airwallex; Tyrone Lobban, Head of Blockchain Launch, Onyx by J.P. Morgan and Massimiliano Alvisini, Senior Vice President & General Manager, Europe, CIS &, Africa, Western Union. Ricky Knox, Chairman at ForMore, was the moderator for this event.
During this discussion, the panel explored what it would look like to remove all intermediaries from the movement of money across borders, and asked the question that, if we accept decentralised ledgers as the technological basis for cross-border payments, how do we manage risk and liability? Also up for debate was the issue of how best to adopt CeFi and DeFi, in order to remove friction and cost in doing business and facilitating payments across borders.
Money20/20: The Latest Company Announcements
Let’s also take a look at some of the interesting announcements by companies in attendance at Money20/20.
Greenly, the tech start-up specialized in helping organizations lower their carbon emissions, announced a 3 million dollars funding round this week to deploy its carbon accounting SaaS to more SMEs and begin its international development.
Greenly, the technology startup specialized in seamless carbon tracking, announced a new fundraising round in the rapidly expanding sector of carbon accounting. For the company, this is an opportunity to accelerate the deployment of its B2B SaaS, and further develop its technology to help SMEs launch their climate strategy more simply. Greenly’s platform automates carbon accountings in full compliance with reporting standards (CDP, GHG and TCFD). The platform intends to disrupt the industry by targeting SMES rather than large enterprises. It is already used by more than a hundred scale-ups and unicorns in France, including Payfit, Swile, Konbini, Foodles, LeoCare, Foodchéri, Outsight, Alma etc.
Fresh with new capital, the green fintech will be able to accelerate the developments of its SaaS product, and make carbon footprint tracking even simpler for SME. One of Greenly’s key added value is to automate carbon analytics, using data accessible through APIs, namely accounting data or billing information from large GHG emission contributors. Greenly has developed an AI-powered analytics & recommendation engine to suggest practical ways to reduce one’s emissions, for example suggesting less carbon-intensive alternatives to suppliers.
Created in 2019 by entrepreneurs who first worked at Withings, Alexis Normand, Matthieu Vegreville and Arnaud Delubac now want Greenly to become a global leader in corporate carbon accounting. It will use its funds to expand the technical & R&D teams, recruit more carbon footprint experts, and build a sales team capable of scaling beyond France, in Europe and the United States. Greenly’s goal is to go from a few hundred customers to a few thousand.
For Alexis Normand, CEO and co-founder, “Greenly’s vision is that all companies should play a role in fighting against global warming. You cannot improve something you don’t measure. But you also need simple tools that any SME can use to make this measure and reduction within reach. We had to invent the software that merges financial and carbon accounting. We are proud to contribute to this revolution. ”
Today there was also the announcement by Edgar, Dunn & Company (EDC), a global consulting company focusing on Fintech and payments, that they are launching a brand new report: Future Fintech – No Borders, Just Horizons – How digital is shaking up international trade, markets, and finance.
Finally, Regula, the leading manufacturer of software and forensic devices with over 29 years of experience in the field of authenticating security documents, is launching this new product – “Face SDK”. This new product consists of Liveness Detection and Face Match Modules. Regula Face SDK also delivers secure (fully on-premise) biometric identity verification.
The necessity of the product was highlighted by their partners’ needs and continuously developing industry standards: 1) a demand for full-cycle remote onboarding for clients and employees, 2) as well as fraud elimination in Identity Verification thanks to a new level of security – Biometric Verification.
Regula provides mobile, web, and desktop SDKs for developers to simply and seamlessly integrate into user-facing applications. Backend services are designed for installation on-premise which allow the user to be the owner of their data.
Face SDK can be used in a variety of industries for different use cases including automated check-in, remote onboarding, KYC, etc, and is in high demand in Fintech, Banking, and Crypto sectors.
More events to come in the days ahead
They are even more events in store for Money20/20 attendees over the next few days. To keep track of them all, tune into our daily summaries, follow our Twitter feed, or stop by for a chat at the event itself!
