Money20/20 Europe in Seven Quotes

Last week I spent three very productive and exciting days in Amsterdam, at Money20/20 Europe. Now, I am a Money20/20 “veteran” – I’ve been going to Las Vegas every single year since the very first event back in 2012 – so I know what to expect: a fantastic opportunity to network and meet “who is who” in payments and fintech, and an effective way to get the finger on the pulse of the hottest issues facing the industry. And yet I must admit, I was blown away – there was a palpable sense of excitement and opportunity, and the overall circus-themed event production was just outstanding!

As always, it’s impossible for any one person to capture everything that goes on at Money20/20. Between the keynotes, individual meetings, expo stands, and parallel session tracks, the takeaways are inevitably personal. As my summary, I wanted to share seven quotes that made an impression on me and made me think. Most of the quotes are not necessarily verbatim, but I hope I captured the essence of the underlying message:

1. “At BBVA, we are focusing from being your money bank to being your personal data bank, based on trust and your consent. Data belongs to you.” - Carlos Torres Villa, CEO, BBVA
2. “At the back end, e.g. in financial crime and operations, big data and analytics is working alright. The biggest problem for us as a global bank is getting enough of the data in the right place to do what we really want to do, given various cross-border issues such as data residency and data privacy. On the front end, we don’t need to reinvent the wheel – banks are not yet making the most of the transaction data they already have.” - Andy Maguire, Group Managing Director & Group COO, HSBC
3. “Banks should forget payments – customers already decided on how they are going to use them – and should focus on giving customers controls over their payments.” - Bill Gajda, SVP, Global Head of Innovation, Visa
4. “Alipay is NOT a payments company; we are a super lifestyle app rooted in China.” - Li Wang, Head of EMEA, Alipay
5. “Digital identity is not a digitised identity. Also, it’s important to solve for multiple identities that we all have – ‘work Dave’ is different from ‘hobby Dave’ or ‘sports Dave’.” - Dave Birch, Director of Innovation, Consult Hyperion
6. “Are chatbots the next offshore call centre – lower cost but bad for customer experience?” - Anonymous question
7. “Technology is like a hammer – you can use it to either build or destroy.” - Ralph Echemendia, Ethical Hacker & CEO, Seguru

Thank you to our clients and everyone else that generously shared their time with me at the event. And thank you to the Money20/20 team for continuing to inspire all of us and for our ongoing partnership. I am already looking forward to Las Vegas in October!