Last week, Vestigo Cards & Payments team had an incredible time discussing the industry trends and our value proposition in back-to-back meetings with potential partners. We’re thrilled to look back on the meaningful connections we made and the exciting opportunities that arose during the event. Meeting our partners and engaging with industry leaders at Money20/20 was truly inspiring.
Having had few days to digest, we compared notes and came up with the following views on the state of the industry. This view is informed primarily by bilateral discussions and impressions from stand activity.
- Innovation continues to be very strong, but some of the recently prominent clusters of energy such as crypto and BNPL were visibly less present and talked about; start-ups are spending more time on thinking about path to profitability vs. few years ago.
- Focus on partnerships increasing further – even large institutions have significant focus on effectively tapping into innovation and efficiency pools – nobody seems to believe anymore that they can develop everything in-house.
- Cards and A2A-payments convergence strategies are spreading: there were many first-time visitors to M20/20 who have been Sibos regulars for decades, many attendees with roles covering cards and payments – we are unable to find similar titles at the historic bottom of our business card box when there was strict separation between the two worlds.
- Embedded Finance partnership strategies are maturing – attention shifting on ability to scale efficiently and win market share; Important difference between contextual and conscious banking – see Paolo Sironi.
- Rising awareness that back-end transformation is an essential element of the overall innovation journey, and that there is no truly great customer experience without a powerful back-end system as a foundation; preference for step-by-step implementations.
- While pipeline of cards back-end projects remains strong, legacy account-to-account payments systems are coming on radar screens of many banks as a priority for transformation & modernization.
- Many discussions about AI, quantum computing, data, … Also more open banking talk than in the past and more nuanced views of the cloud, microservices, etc.