INSIGHTS FROM MONEY 2020 EUROPE 2024

Money 2020 Europe was held at the sprawling Rai Conference Centre in Amsterdam between 4-6 June.

This year’s theme was ‘Human By Machine’, with human relationship building heavily on display through the numerous connections being made and meetings being held.

Revolut opened the event with a talk explaining how they started out as a travel card in 2015 and have now expanded to 40 million customers.

Their VP Profitability & Global Business, David Tirado Blanco, explained how the group was now seeking to expand deeper into primary banking through offering more services including equities, trading, ETF’s, savings and more.

Artificial Intelligence was a huge theme throughout the conference. It was nice to chat to and hear the opinions of Clare Durodié, who eloquently explained how the winning strategies for the future of AI implementation in banking and financial services have to be built around three critical areas, being;
– Safety
– Security
– Ethics

Clare explained how data confidentiality and security are of paramount importance in an industry largely based on trust.

It was highlighted how politicians are genuinely concerned about the job displacement AI will cause.

One AI panel participant even went so far as to say that ‘AI will displace jobs at an astronomical rate and a huge number of jobs will become obsolete due to the time savings from use of this technology’.

On the flip side of this, data science, machine learning and AI literacy will become key future skills. From the Chairman down to the receptionist, AI will become a core competency to remain relevant.

There was a rallying call from Clare to take your life into your own hands and become AI literate.

There were many sessions on Digital Transformation, with the often-posed question of, do we innovate in house or outsource?

It was evident both models can succeed, but top-down executive support from the most senior levels of the company is required for either to work.

Tokenisation of assets was discussed in many sessions and movement from tokenisation of physical goods and assets to real cash a key theme.

Dirk Kuyt the ex-Liverpool football player held a great talk on succeeding in elite sport. Dirk mentioned that if you turn up everyday and give your 100% best effort you will always win or learn. I could not agree more.

Open Banking was discussed in less panel sessions than when I was last in Amsterdam at Money 2020. It was evident Open Banking is a ‘slow burn’ and banks don’t really want to share their data. If it was my customer list that I’d built up over decades or even centuries, I wouldn’t want too either.

Without a regulatory mandate it was clear that banks won’t come to the table to share their valuable data and at the same time incur significant integration implementation costs.

I had an interesting conversation with SWIFT around the key agenda topics for SIBOS being held in Beijing in October this year. Look out for some exciting updates on my SIBOS activities in future updates.

There was a fantastic session on trust and how it takes a long time to build and can be lost in seconds.

Building a simple brand that is 1. Universal 2. Enduring 3. Scalable should be a key goal of any organisation.

A key message was to look at things from the recipients’ point of view which has been a core tenet of my successful and expanding sales growth program ‘Realise the Revenues’.

I was delighted with the customer meetings that took place and new collaborations developed during the conference.

There will be some more exciting updates in future newsletters, but for now I leave you with one key message I took away from the conference and that is be a constant learner.

Thanks to the team at Money2020 for putting on such an exhilarating event and bringing the banking and payments ecosystem together.