Money20/20 has it all. From Matt Gaetz roaming the halls of the Venetian, to a conference attendee who looks uncannily like Formula1 driver Max Verstappen, to really nice Owala bottles from dLocal.
There’s also substance amidst the buzz and doppelgängers and merch:
- Congressman Mike Flood told Financial Technology Association’s Penny Lee that he’d vote to reopen the government with an ACA tax credit extension included in the budget; that the CLARITY Act may pass by year’s end; and that he hopes open banking statutes don’t require congressional intervention.
- Google Cloud announced a tie-up with PayPal focused on agentic commerce. Cryptographic security features respond to the “dominant conversation” surrounding security within that “growth space,” according to Toby Brown, Global Head of Regulated Industry Solutions at Google Cloud.
- Betterment President Mike Reust sang a slightly different tune. He told me there’s consumer pushback to the deployment of LLMs within wealthtech ops, and the use of agentic solutions for money flows; portfolio optimization is still best done through less black-box-y mechanics, especially as regulations mandate the ability to clearly explain why certain trades or financial-strategy decisions were or were not made. (You heard it here first: “We let Claude take the wheel” doesn’t pass Finra muster.)
- NCUA Chairman Kyle Hauptman took the stage to talk all things stablecoins and credit unions. He held a Venetian/Palazzo poker chip in one hand, and a ten-dollar bill in the other, waving both around while he likened stablecoins to poker chips: a stable, non-fiat representation of our national currency. Were the crypto-gambling undertones of Hauptman’s stablecoin sermonizing intentional? Doesn’t seem like it, but don’t bet against the house.
- Infrastructure and service-provision players are still digesting Fed Governor Chris Waller’s “skinny” Fed master account idea. Will new pipelines obviate the need for a card issuer or payments processor or BaaS provider? Tbd, but, assuming the Fed still upholds stringent risk-management standards, it seems the “skinny” accounts won’t necessarily open the floodgates for Fed access.
Lingering questions: What are tech giants (Meta, Google, Apple, etc.) doing in the stablecoin realm? Why is nobody talking about digital asset treasuries, and their multi-billion-dollar collapse a couple weeks ago? And is Max Verstappen really at Money20/20? More to come in the next few weeks.
– Adam
