The second day of Money 20/20 in Amsterdam served up more industry insight and new product launches with more than 2,300 companies – from tech giants to the latest fintech startups – in attendance at the event.
Alongside the content and educational sessions, there was also the chance for a bit of fun. Attendees could head to the Money Beach Club, grab some swag from the Merch Machine or head to the Moving Light Studio to create their personalised Money20/20 cinemagraph.
GoCardless on ‘nagging’ Natwest
In the morning, Hiroki Takeuchi, CEO of GoCardless, and Mark Brant, chief payments officer at NatWest delved into their partnership calling it a ‘really productive relationship’. GoCardless was among the first payment providers that NatWest Group signed agreements to offer Variable Recurring Payments (VRP) as a payment offer.
“We’ve always from the beginning been asking for things that you [Natwest] weren’t really allowed to do before and trying to change the way that businesses were able to get access to things like direct debit,” said Takeuchi. “There’s an element of us nagging and asking ‘well, can we do this? Can we do that?’.
“One of the things that’s been really great about working with the RBS Group is that they’ve been much more open minded than many other banks, especially in the earlier days. We always have to do things properly and NatWest obviously has to make sure that we don’t go rogue, but it’s been a really productive relationship.”
Women in finance
On the Fusion stage, Money20/20 celebrated five years of RiseUp, Money20/20’s programme dedicated to the acceleration of women’s careers in financial services. It revealed that more than 70 per cent of participants in its programme had moved into a more senior role, while 85 per cent felt more prepared for their careers. Ninety five per cent said they had expanded their network.
Money20/20’s president, Tracey Davies, summarised: “It is certainly inspirational to hear stories about this programme as we didn’t know what it was going to be at first. For some reason, women traditionally have not prioritised the power of the network as much as they should. And that was really the vision for Rise – connecting women to help each other and bringing women onto bigger and bigger stages.”
MiCA ‘to rule them all’
On the Elements stage, Vishal Sacheendran, Binance’s director for MENA & Europe, delved into the incoming EU Markets in Cryptoassets (MiCA) regulation and stressed the importance of regulating crypto assets.
MiCA aims to regulate the issuance, distribution and trading of digital assets, as well as the provision of crypto-asset services. It is likely to enter into force in early to mid-2024.
Sacheendran said: “MiCA is a regulation to rule them all. This is now a legislation in place where you have little room for national divergence, more clarity on how it should be going down the road and more collaboration from the regulators. Whatever activity you do in the crypto asset space, you’re going to be regulated to that extent.”
Big ideas for small businesses
At the Money-Bot stage, a panel including Richard Davies, CEO at Allica Bank, Lucy Cohen, co-founder at Mazuma, Ian Sutherland, chief financial officer at Tide and Maartje Cremers at Knab, had a great debate about the future of SMB banking.
“We have focused on building products and services that deliberately make it easy for for SME owners and people managing those small businesses to to actually be efficient and save them time and how they operate,” said Sutherland.
The influencers speak out
In a session on the Outer Limits stage, OnlyFans chief strategy and operations officer Keily Blair chatted to Gina Clarke from Money20/20 before they were joined by two creators to discuss their strategies for monetising their content and the services they need from the fintech world to be successful.
Blair said: “I think every creator has their own independent monetisation strategy and what works well for one creator might not work for another creator. We don’t succeed unless our creators succeed because we have no advertising revenue, and it’s entirely subscription based, right? So we are constantly looking for ways to make our platform better for creators.” 
Polly meets Philip
Our very own Polly Jean Harrison appeared on the Fusion Stage, chatting to Philip Belamant, CEO and co-founder of Zilch, about its new ad-subsidised-payments-network (ASPN) platform launch and its rapid growth in the industry.
Finally, we also heard from the Minister of digital transformation for Ukraine in a virtual video, where he shared the progress Ukraine has made in terms of technological advancement despite the ongoing conflict.
