Reflections on Money2020Europe 2017

A few days after EBADay in Dublin, I attended Money2020 Europe in Copenhagen. I went to the inaugural event last year, though much of my time was spent with a client. Although this event is nowhere near its US counterpart’s size, there was a good turnout and a fair few exhibitors.

The organizers had pulled out the stops. Unofficial sources suggested over 5,000 registrations, and my rough estimate was of almost double the exhibitors. I met a number of “usual suspects,” but otherwise it was difficult to get a sense of quite who was attending, other than trawling through the app.

That said, I was hosting a panel on instant payments and asked the audience by show of hands how many were bankers. About two-thirds raised their hands which surprised both panel and the audience! My sense was that it’s very much a fintech event with a very retail lens, but with the fintechs now trying to meet bankers to sell to them, rather than to tell them how they were going to replace banks. This was something Zil and I predicted in our series of reports: Banks, Retailers, and Fintech: Reimagining Payments Relationships, Part Three: The Fintech Perspective. Perhaps that’s why we had some frippery in the hall, with a barber and bicycles offering fruit. (Though, as I think about it, some of the past Sibos have had their moments too!)

The event primarily stood out for both the breadth and depth of the agenda, with c.130 sessions over three days, and some well-known names doing keynotes, including Jack Dorsey and Anthony Jenkins. Not only that, but the sessions I popped in to, like the Anthony Jenkins session pictured below, were very well attended. You can just see him if you look below the middle screen in the far distance!