A Sorkin-esque writers’ room wouldn’t dare hold a fintech trade conference in the guts of The Venetian. Regulators holding poker chips as they deliver stump speeches; SVB loudly proclaiming its return; crypto platforms celebrating their time in the limelight; it’s all too on the nose.
And yet.
As with virtually all things money — including poker chips — meaningful interpretations of Money20/20 should center on the question of risk. Taking a longer view can demonstrate where risk finds a home today, and where the dust may have settled, making for more predictable sectorial activity.
One might argue that (some of) the BaaS landscape falls into that latter camp: where things don’t feel as frenetic or crisis-laden as they once did. Take it with a grain of salt, but reading our interview with Renata Caine, Green Dot’s SVP/GM of Embedded Finance, suggests enforcement actions turned to consolidations and something of a “survival of the fittest” dynamic, leaving behind the banking partners and fintech platforms that clients still trust to handle their business. Seeing the new wave of OCC charter applications and (likely) approvals, with Erebor Bank as its vanguard, suggests that time-old cycle of market proliferation, scandal, and collapse may eventually occur in new market spaces.
(Yes, we’re talking about them again:) Stablecoins are most likely a market that will see a proliferation, a scandal, and a collapse and consolidation — despite the branding inherent to the product’s name. Just two weeks ago, stablecoin issuer Paxos accidentally issued 300 trillion PayPal stablecoin tokens in a fat-fingering error. And Ethereum-powered USDe briefly depegged; crypto sources tell me the depegging may lead to $20 billion in losses on Wall Street, as digital asset treasuries (DATs) took a massive hit from the event. And there’s the question of interoperability among stablecoins, especially as state governments in the US — Wyoming with the “Frontier Stable Token,” Bank of North Dakota with the “Roughrider Stablecoin” — throw their hats in the hokey ring; erecting a DTCC for the DeFi-verse, but with magnitudes more currencies in circulation than we have national denominations now, suggests an era of inefficiency on the horizons.
Some might frame these issues as “growing pains” and one-off blips that only reinforce the need for the GENIUS Act to be enforced sooner rather than later. (It’s in the purgatorial rulemaking stage.) Ditto for the CLARITY Act becoming real-life law. Nevertheless, that Coinbase can lock down a partnership with Amex suggests major incumbents see the juice as worth the squeeze. A product leader at Coinbase told me Amex “saw where the puck was going” even before the GENIUS Act was signed, and was “skating towards it” for a long time. Same could be said, arguably, for Standard Chartered, which could use its international bent — including its presence in emerging markets with volatile currencies — to its advantage, developing its banking capabilities around digital assets in friendlier jurisdictions before applying those practices here.
“We have the risk frameworks and the compliance governance in place to manage that type of instability in those markets, and that lends itself to an easier transition into how do we deal with digital asset capabilities in the various markets that we’re in,” said Jennifer Lassiter, Standard Chartered’s Managing Director and Head of Digital Assets, Americas and Europe.
Bringing consumers into this blockchain-based fold requires certain regulatory statutes to survive legal challenges from incumbent banks. The uncertainty around open banking’s future, as ideas like the SOLO Network push for new ways to share and monetize consumer financial data. I asked Ji Kim, CEO of the Crypto Council for Innovation, about the dynamic at play when crypto companies are tying up with banks on the one hand, and on the other hand, they stand on different sides of the open-banking issue. (The CCI has supported the FTA’s efforts, co-signed letters, submitted comments, etc.)
“We’ll see continued integration and collaboration between the banks and crypto-native companies. But…consumers should be able to determine who and what and how their data should be shared with a third party, their duly authorized representative,” he said.
But enough about crypto. It was also striking to see some of the incumbents and their respective forms of outreach. JPMorgan Payments, for instance, had an automaton-looking kiosk on the expo hall floor that offered Juice Press bottles ordered through a tablet. Its comms team billed the kiosk as a glimpse into the future of payments: “In just a few minutes, you can complete a biometric payment — and enjoy a complimentary juice.” If you looked through the automaton’s tinted window you could see a worker squeezing juice concentrate from plastic sachets. Maybe the obfuscated supply chain will be the subject of Karen Hao’s next book.
And then there was Fiserv. Festooned in its Dutch Grand Prix-esque orange blazers and other bold-colored regalia, it took over the Canaletto restaurant at the Venetian for a grand kickback with clients. Cause and effect: Order a calzone in Vegas, and the next day your stock will tank. Sorkin wouldn’t dream that up either.
–Adam Willems
