The future of finance isn’t waiting; it’s being built now. That was the main message from Money20/20 Europe, where the world’s fintech visionaries, banking giants, disruptive start-ups, and policymakers converged in Amsterdam. 

Last year, under the theme of ‘Human x Machine’, there was a focus on AI, use cases and where it will go next. That’s not to say AI was absent from the agenda or the show floor this year. While still a hotly debated topic, particularly around agentic AI, it was woven into broader conversations as the use cases have matured.

Instead, there was a notable shift in tone and topics for 2025, perhaps reflecting wider political and economic pressures, towards payments infrastructure conversations focused on real-time rails, open banking and finance, and why the future of consumer and B2B payments is embedded.

Across multiple announcements at Money20/20 Europe, open banking and account-to-account (A2A) payments featured heavily. That included Wero, the pan-European digital wallet and instant payment solution developed by the European Payments Initiative (EPI), a consortium of major European banks and payment service providers.

Launched in 2024, Wero aims to unify Europe’s fragmented payments landscape by replacing national payment schemes like Germany’s Giropay, France’s Paylib, Belgium and Luxembourg’s Payconiq, and the Netherlands’ iDEAL with a single, interoperable system. It uses SEPA Instant rails to ensure real-time, A2A transactions across borders.

The platform currently enables A2A payments for over 40 million users, and the five markets covered by Wero represent more than 60% of all retail payments in the EU. Speaking at Money20/20 Europe, Ludovic Francesconi, Chief Member and Strategy Officer at EPI said, “Our mission is to create a real European solution, and an innovative wallet, based on instant payments.”

During the event, Revolut became the highest-profile fintech to back Wero. By integrating Wero into its app, Revolut customers in France, Germany and Belgium can send and request money via A2A, with further expansion into e-commerce and point-of-sale planned for 2026. Wero could transform how Europeans pay and foster a more competitive, innovative, and resilient European payments market if widely adopted.

Hot on the heels of Revolut’s announcement, Worldline, a shareholder of the EPI since its inception, confirmed it will offer Wero as a payment option for online checkouts in Germany from this summer, with Belgium following in October and France, Luxembourg and the Netherlands due in 2026.

Meanwhile, Deutsche Bank, another of Wero’s backers, announced a new partnership with Mastercard to expand Request to Pay (R2P) functionality for merchants. Built on Mastercard’s open banking platform, the service allows customers to pay directly from their bank accounts with real-time settlement and immediate confirmation.

This builds on a recent wave of significant Pay by Bank announcements, such as the launch of Visa A2A in the UK, a week before Money20/20.

But while plenty of attention was on the future of payments, it was also evident that cards won’t be going anywhere soon, as seen in two announcements from Visa regarding its collaboration with Klarna to launch a pilot for its new Klarna Card and the rollout of Zilch’s first physical card.

Initiatives like the digital euro and PSD3 drive consolidation and collaboration, making it easier for new players to enter the market and for customers to benefit from seamless, cross-border financial services.

But there’s much more work to be done. Early on day one, during the session ‘The future of open banking: What comes next?’ Simon Taylor presented research on API performance with the phrase that summarised current issues: “A single bad payment is a broken promise.” That research revealed that 72% of respondents are not tracking 6-month activities for open banking, and 20% reported APIs failing more than 1% of the time.

That, Taylor and his panellists from Radiam and Plaid suggested, is because many European banks treat open banking as a compliance project rather than a customer experience. API performance is critical for Wero and other open banking payment initiatives because they use SEPA Instant as the underlying payment rail.

Another session saw an audience question whether open banking payments could ever be an alternative to cards, asking: “How do you replicate the consumer protection and chargebacks that make cards so resilient?”

Henk Van Hulle, CEO of Open Banking Limited, acknowledged the point but noted that in the UK, “We’re a seven-year-old industry competing with one that’s 67. We’ll get there – but we need time, rulebooks, and commercial models.”

Partnership was a recurring and returning theme at this year’s event. Numerous panels examined how successful firms will be those that can orchestrate complex ecosystems rather than just build standalone solutions.

Following on from the discussion on delivering a viable alternative to card payments, multiple sessions referenced the recent announcement of 31 firms committing to fund a new entity wholly owned and run by the industry to support the delivery of commercial variable payments (cVRPs) in the UK. Those firms include Barclays, HSBC, Mastercard, Monzo, PayPal, Plaid, Revolut, TrueLayer and Wise. The proposed initial use cases for cVRPs will focus on selected regulated industries, such as payments to utility and rail companies, regulated financial firms, e-money institutions, government bodies, and charities.

In case you missed it, stablecoins are the talk of the town. While they still represent a small share of global payment flows, their role in B2B finance is expanding. A panel featuring executives from Stripe, Remote, Fireblocks and Sardine suggested that while stablecoins may not be transformative today, they're already doing practical work behind the scenes.

Most of the panellists agreed that stablecoins have moved beyond hype and are starting to work quietly, in the background, enabling dollar access across the globe and reshaping B2B settlement flows. However, they also noted that despite the positive industry noise, the broader industry is still watching from the sidelines to see how they develop, and consumer adoption remains low.

So why is there so much interest? Stripe’s acquisition of Bridge and recent announcements by OpenPayd and BVNK suggest momentum is building.

Speaking at Money20/20, Neetika Bansal, Head of MaaS at Stripe, said a shift in customer demand drove the firm’s acquisition. “The kind of demand we’re seeing from our users is incredible,” she told the audience. “Whether these are entrepreneurs in countries that Stripe’s not served before or large enterprises trying to figure out their treasury functions, it’s coming from all sorts of users.”

That demand isn’t limited to payments. As Stripe’s Bansal explained, integrating Bridge’s stablecoin infrastructure enabled Stripe to meet users where they are without forcing them to learn new tools or understand blockchain mechanics.

The panel resisted sweeping predictions, but there was little doubt among the speakers that stablecoins are becoming part of the financial infrastructure, even if it's slower than the fanfare around them suggests.

Ran Goldi, SVP of Payments and Network at Fireblocks, commented that most successful payment technologies don’t arrive with fanfare. They are adopted where they solve real problems and then scale. “What we will see in 2025, more than anything else, is payout flow increasing, both to merchants and directly to consumers,” he said.

So that’s another Money20/20 in the bag. Given the ongoing payment infrastructure conversations and the push towards real-time, coupled to some uncertainty around the US move toward open banking we’re looking forward to seeing what that show brings. Will there be more stablecoin conversations? Is AI all anyone cares about? How will B2B payments evolve?

We’re looking forward to connecting with the financial services community on the other side of the Atlantic in late October.