Amsterdam in June. The canals, the sunshine. Thousands of financial services professionals gathered for Europe’s annual fintech festival, Money 20/20. While in 2023, AI was firmly on the agenda, in 2024 it was the main agenda under the event theme of ‘Human x Machine’.

But where is it being used and where will it go? Over three days the event looked to answer those questions, highlighting the successes, the concerns and the big ideas that could set the course for the future of finance. Today AI is making existing processes more efficient. Perhaps the most publicised is Klarna, who’ve partnered with OpenAI to enhance customer service interactions. In one month, the assistant was managing two-thirds of customer service chats—2.3 million conversations—in 23 markets and 35 languages.

Klarna expects the integration to increase profits by $40 million in 2024, and the chatbot's efficiency has resulted in fewer errors, a 25% decrease in repeat inquiries and reduced average conversation times from 11 to 2 minutes.

While technological innovation is happening across the financial services industry, B2B payments have tended to see slower adoption. Exploring why that’s the case, the challenges and opportunities that come with increased automation under the theme ‘B2B Payments Reimagined: The Rise of Automated Finance’, Emma Hagan, our Chief Risk and Compliance Officer argued it has the potential to go much further.

On the same panel, Seamus Smith, Group President of Global B2B Payments at FIS, explained how new technologies could change the game for B2B payments: “The mission business-to-business has to embrace is looking forward, and that’s what AI will enable with machine learning and other really developed data analytics. But I would say that we’re at a fairly early stage. AI is a very powerful tool, but it’s one that needs to be looked after carefully by the industry.”

While former French Prime Minister François Hollande gave the keynote, for AI enthusiasts the ‘main event’ was the fireside chat between Patrice Amann, EMEA Regional Business Leader for Financial Services at Microsoft and Kevin Levitt, Director of Financial Services at NVIDIA. As leaders in the field, attendees flocked to hear their discussion on the latest trends in AI, the growth in applications for generative AI and, in particular, how next-gen digital assistants could rewrite the banking customer experience.

Microsoft’s Amann defined current AI applications into ‘left brain’ analytical and ‘right brain’ creative tools, arguing that marrying the two will deliver the breakthrough in the next generation of AI.

While painting a picture of financial lives run by AI, he also cautioned that its development needed to deliver transparency, accountability and bias prevention. That, he said, requires rethinking “from the ground up” privacy, security and compliance.

Levitt remarked that while AI hype had put pressure on financial services leadership to deliver Generative AI (Gen AI) applications and services it had to deliver a meaningful outcome.

He added: "The use cases over the past year have driven companies and financial services companies in particular to find that level of accuracy that gives them the chance to not only leverage and against external problems, but to really suit production externally.”

A big question for many leaving the event was, what does this all mean for me, my firm and the industry itself? The conclusion was, perhaps, no surprise. We don’t know, yet, but AI will be a catalyst for significant change.

Away from the rise of the machines there was space for plenty of topics to have their moment, including tokenisation and the role of digital currencies. With digital money already a mainstay and cash use declining, multiple sessions examined how these new forms of money will affect the payment mix.

Panel sessions, fireside chats and press releases, continued to discuss ‘proof of concepts’ and ‘minimal viable products’. Swift’s Pallavi Thakur shared insights from its recent work, suggesting that to move from concept to reality will require unprecedented levels of international regulatory and commercial cooperation.

“For new forms of value like CBDCs to be successful, we must overcome key barriers to global adoption. That means fostering trust between different types of institutions and putting interoperability at the heart of everything we do," she added.

A joint presentation between Swift and French banking group BNP Paribas reinforced the need to build interoperability. The two firms have collaborated to examine blockchain interoperability and also the traditional and legacy banking systems with which blockchains dependently interact.

Julien Clausse, Head of BNP Paribas CIB’s Asset Foundry Digital Assets platform stressed its emphasis on multi-system interoperability.

“Today, there is not one network, but actually loads of networks that are not consolidated yet. So how we can connect all these networks, blockchains, new networks, legacy networks, existing networks, or even our own systems internally? That’s one of the areas we are exploring, including the experimentation we did with Swift,” he explained.

Some of the strongest comments on the topic came, perhaps unsurprisingly, during a panel titled ‘The Elephant in the Room: Do CBDCs Solve Real Problems?’ Ronit Ghose, Global Head of Future of Finance at Citi, didn’t hold back in his views regarding CBDCs:

“I agree with the sentiment that this is a solution looking for a problem. I don’t see why we need a CBDC. No one really cares about CBDCs, or is asking for them – literally no one.”

Jón Egilsson, Chairman and Co-founder of Monerium added that given the wide remit of central banks, introducing CBDCs should not be their priority: “The important role of the regulators and central banks is making sure we have the right regulation for safeguarding and making sure that consumers are safe.”

While looking forward grabbed plenty of headlines, many delegates were focused on the here and now and the topics of open banking and the future of payments across the eurozone.

In our review last year we pondered how much it would develop across the region and whether active user numbers continue their current trajectory. While that is true of the UK, where data from Open Banking Limited, shows more than 9 million active users, across the continent the picture is mixed.

Many of the payments-focussed panels tackled that, noting that for open banking adoption to grow in the region requires banks to recognise its potential to drive revenue, innovation and customer satisfaction. They discussed the upcoming SEPA Instant mandate as a catalyst for wider eurozone adoption of real-time, account-to-account payments.

As that infrastructure develops, it will open the door to embedding financial experiences at the point of need across numerous sectors. Huw Davies, Co-founder and CEO of Ozone API, highlighted the importance of leveraging common infrastructure and industry collaboration to accelerate progress, noting that regulators and industry coalitions are pivotal in this transformation: “One of the really interesting things we’re seeing is there’s a recognition that this can all be massively accelerated, if the industry works together to leverage common and shared infrastructure.”

The sentiment from the show was despite a slower start, open banking is gaining traction and will accelerate over the next 12 months. Let’s see how much it’s changed when we return to Amsterdam in 2025.

With AI taking up so much airtime and strategic thinking across every facet of the industry – from B2C personal assistants to B2B payments – the theme is bound to resurface in October when Money20/20 USA touches down in Las Vegas.

We’re excited to see how that agenda compares to its European counterpart, and we look forward to attending those sessions and connecting with the financial services community there.