Day 1 at Money20/20 Europe 2019

Money20/20 Europe, the biggest FinTech event in the region, kicked off in Amsterdam yesterday, and, as President Tracey Davies opened the show with, is “where tech, money and magic meet”.

Key note speakers range from AmazonPay to OakNorth and Alipay to Santander, and this year’s conference also sees the launch of Rise Up, a global programme designed to support women in financial services reach increased seniority in their careers.

With an exciting agenda ahead, the FleishmanHillard team is here to cover all the action.

PayPal announces Commerce Platform

In the first announcement of the event, PayPal’s senior vice president, core markets Peggy Alford took to the main stage to unveil the launch of the “PayPal Commerce Platform” – which will bring together existing parts of PayPal’s payments business to allow small businesses and merchants connect to its 277 million users worldwide. In the first keynote speech of this years’ event, Alford explained to the Money 20/20 audience that the new platform has been designed to meet the needs of marketplaces and ecommerce solution providers of all sizes, and will facilitate transactions in more than 100 currencies and across 200+ markets in which PayPal operates. Beginning today, the PayPal Commerce Platform will be available in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the United States – with PayPal planning more market roll-outs later in the year.

Ambassador Susan Rice joins Feedzai on the main stage

In the latest of Feedzai’s renowned speaker series, which in the past has featured the likes of Stephen Hawking, Richard Branson and Steve Wozniak, Feedzai CEO Nuno Sebastiao was joined on the mainstage by Ambassador Susan Rice, former National Security Adviser to US President Obama for a session, titled “Banking on security: Global affairs, and the age of reputation crisis”. As a senior White House official, who was responsible for much of the global security policies during the President Obama administration, Ambassador Rice shared insights from her time in both the Clinton and Obama administrations and some of the global security threats facing the world today, with Sebastiao relating those insights to the need for institutions to continually invest in their fight against financial crime. Drawing on her time making critical national security decisions on limited information, Ambassador Rice shared a key lesson for financial organisations is to “get comfortable making decisions with less than perfect data”.

It’s about more than just payments

While of course one of the cornerstones of the FinTech industry is payments, as the speakers took to the stage, it became clear that players in the space are venturing into new territories. Branching out from pure play financial services and payments, the likes of WeChat Pay and Naspers spoke about using payments as a springboard into new areas – befitting to one of the twelve themes of Money20/20 this year: “Platform Ecology”.

Jeff Hu, Regional Director at WeChat Pay Europe, took to the Industry Transmutation Stage to discuss its open strategy to co-create an open system with different partners so that customers not only use WeChat Pay to pay for goods and services, but can book a restaurant or order a taxi. Jeff explained that “the payment isn’t the end of the transaction”, it’s really only the beginning and their mission is to connect – people, information and services.

This concept of the SuperApp is something that Hoyoung Yun, CEO of kakaobank, also presented, bringing to life the concept of the one-stop-shop and how what originated as a payments provider, can now seamlessly integrate all aspects of consumers’ online lives. This is set to be a dominant theme throughout the three-days, with Bob van Dijk of Naspers describing this level of integration as “the holy grail” and Roland Palmer, Head of Alipay Europe, set to present on the idea of ‘payments plus’ tomorrow.

Stay tuned for the Day 2 update!