Money20/20 USA runs October 18–21 at the Venetian, and it’s the last one there. Next year the show moves to the LVCC, with Resorts World as the night venue and the Loop shuttling people between the two. So enjoy the Venetian hallway meetings while they last.
You know the numbers by now: 11,000+ people, 3,400 companies, 630+ speakers. Here’s what’s actually worth paying attention to.
Agentic commerce: the rails are built, the fight is over the customer
Every booth is going to say “agentic.” Ignore most of it. The networks already built the plumbing. Visa has Intelligent Commerce, plus the Trusted Agent Protocol it rolled out with Cloudflare last October. Mastercard has Agent Pay and its agentic tokens, ran a live agentic payment in Hong Kong back in March, and got ranked number one for payment infrastructure by Juniper in May. Worldline and ING did Europe’s first production agentic transaction with Mastercard in June. FIS has been selling banks a packaged agentic commerce offering since January.
So “can it work” is answered. What isn’t answered is who carries the risk. When an agent buys the wrong thing, who eats the dispute? When an AI agent sits between the cardholder and the merchant, does the issuing bank still own that relationship, or is it just the funding source behind somebody else’s agent? Infosys has a panel Monday afternoon (Galileo 902) asking basically that: who owns the customer once agents take over the transaction. If you’re at a bank, that’s your session.
The agenda gets it. “Who Let the Bots Pay?” (Okta, Skyfire, Experian, Mastercard) and “The Trust Layer for Agentic Commerce” (Mastercard, Skyfire) are both about guardrails, not features. You’re going to hear “Know Your Agent” all week.
Stablecoins: lots of stage time, still no rulebook
Here’s the part nobody on stage is going to lead with. The GENIUS Act’s one-year deadline for final rules passed on July 18, and regulators still haven’t finished them. The law takes effect January 18, 2027 at the latest, which is about three months away. So every bank pitching a stablecoin product in Vegas is building against proposed rules that could still change.
The ABA has been leaning hard on the yield provisions, specifically to keep stablecoins from turning into deposit substitutes. That’s the real fight. It’s a deposits fight more than a tech one, and it’s worth keeping in mind every time someone on stage says “programmable money.”
Sessions worth your time: Fireblocks CEO Michael Shaulov and Sunayna Tuteja (ex-Fed innovation lead, now at the Atlantic Council) on “Stablecoins Without the BS: What $1.5T in Transactions Actually Signals.” Citi, Coinbase and Stripe on tokenized real-world assets. Phantom with Sequoia arguing crypto is the future of consumer fintech, which is going to annoy plenty of bankers in the room. Former CFTC chair Chris Giancarlo is over on The Intersection stage, where the regulation and geopolitics stuff lives this year.
Kalshi’s on the agenda too. A prediction market getting stage time at the biggest banking and payments show in the country tells you where a lot of money is moving.
The keynotes are a bank story
PNC’s Bill Demchak, HSBC’s Racquel Oden, Early Warning CEO Cameron Fowler, SWIFT Americas CEO Leigh Amaro, Wells Fargo’s head of AI products Faraz Shafiq, and Adyen’s chief risk and compliance officer Mariëtte Swart.
Fowler runs the company behind Zelle, which has taken a lot of heat over scams, so listen for what he says about fraud and reimbursement. And Adyen putting its compliance chief on a keynote tells you how much of this year is about risk instead of shiny product.
The sleeper is Mercado Pago CEO Osvaldo Gimenez with Google Play’s Pete Albers, on wallets pulling cash-first consumers in Latin America into the financial system. That’s where real user growth is happening.
Who’s bringing what
Early vendor news is thin (it always is before Monday), but a few are worth a look.
SoundHound AI is at booth #7033 with banking agents on its OASYS platform that handle a full request and hand off to a human when needed. That’s a voice AI company best known for cars and restaurants now going after banks. Remitly Business is at booth 8023 with cross-border payouts for platforms, which is Remitly pushing past consumer remittances into B2B. ChainUp is at #13133 with its institutional digital asset stack and a private exec night Monday at Bottled Blonde. And the World Gold Council is pitching “Gold as a Service.” Sure.
The real announcements land Monday morning when the floor opens.
The Money Awards
Winners are announced Sunday night on the Exchange Stage, second year for the program. The banking category is basically a fraud and identity bracket, with Plaid, Sardine, Socure and Oscilar up against U.S. Bank and others. Payments has Circle, J.P. Morgan Payments, Marqeta and Privy (Stripe’s wallet infrastructure buy). Partnerships is the one I’d watch: Branch & Instacart, U.S. Bank & Edward Jones, NatWest & Tunic Pay, and the Bank of Korea with SOOHO.IO. A central bank in a fintech awards category is not something you see every year.
What big this year?
The two biggest fights at Money20/20 this year are going to be over who controls the transaction and who owns the customer relationship,” said a spokesperson for MarketingBanks.com.
A few things are going to dominate the conversation:
- Agentic AI — not chatbots, but agents that can actually make purchases, move money and act on a customer’s behalf.
- Stablecoins — increasingly being treated as a real payment rail rather than just a crypto product.
- Fraud and identity — especially how banks verify AI-driven transactions and stop bad actors from using agents to game the system.
- Liability — who eats the loss when an AI agent makes the wrong purchase, sends money to the wrong place or triggers a dispute.
- Customer ownership — whether the bank, the wallet, the payment network or the AI platform ends up owning the relationship.
- Tokenization — real-world assets, digital dollars and the infrastructure needed to move more financial activity on-chain.
- Trust — probably the biggest one. If customers don’t understand who is making the decision or where their money is going, none of the rest matters.
That is what makes this year more interesting than the usual round of fintech hype. A lot of these technologies are getting close to the point where banks, card networks and fintech companies have to stop talking about what they could do and start answering what happens when real customers actually use them.
Logistics
Badge pickup starts Sunday at 8am in the Venetian Ballroom. The Money Hall is open Monday through Wednesday but closes at noon on Wednesday, so don’t leave booth visits for the last day. First-timers networking is Monday 4:30 to 7, and Money by Night runs that same evening from 8:30 to 11:30.
