Money20/20 2025 recap: Fintech’s big shift to collaboration
Every year, Money20/20 is a little different, but 2025 especially felt like a new direction. Overall, the theme this year was collaboration: Building something better alongside banks, financial institutions, and other fintechs.
Money20/20 2025 revolved around four core concepts: Fintech Spring, the Age of Infrastructure, the Global Payments Race, and Securing Trust. Each pointed to the same conclusion: Fintech disruptors are becoming collaborators, working directly with traditional financial institutions to build shared rails, integrate systems, and solve problems together.
The fintechs that win in the next decade are embracing this ecosystem mindset. To prevent fraud, they’re collaborating with peers. To verify human and non-human identities alike, they’re partnering with regional players.
This ecosystem shift will demand new (and more configurable) approaches to KYC, AML, and KYB. Here are our three main takeaways from Money20/20:
1. Data sharing is critical to fighting fraud
Fraudsters work in organized rings. When one discovers a weakness in your verification process, the entire ring knows. Meanwhile, most fintechs still operate in silos, which means they're often one step behind.
At Money20/20, speakers across multiple sessions emphasized one solution: data sharing. When done thoughtfully and with proper consent, sharing verified identity data across trusted partners helps companies catch fraud faster. Data sharing can also create better user experiences and reduce friction for legitimate users. When users can move between platforms without reverifying their identity each time, everyone wins.
This mindset requires a fundamental shift in how fintechs think about identity. Simply put, the ecosystem moves too fast for every fintech to continue verifying users independently. To fight fraud effectively and maintain user trust, fintechs must verify identity at the ecosystem level.
Takeaway: Collaboration is the path to both security and innovation. Companies that embrace shared infrastructure and responsible data sharing will be better positioned to fight fraud and deliver smoother user experiences.
2. AI is now core infrastructure
As with prior years, AI was everywhere (including an AI stage with an AI presenter!). But this year, I noticed that the conversations had become far more nuanced. Instead of debating whether AI is hype, people were thinking about which use cases really work and how to apply them.
Perhaps one of the biggest hot topics was agentic commerce, which has introduced a novel challenge: Know Your Agent (KYA). It's no longer enough to distinguish between humans and AI. Organizations now need to verify whether an AI agent is authorized to act on behalf of a user within the context of a check-out flow or transaction. This shift requires entirely new approaches to identity verification and authentication that verifies authorization, rather than just humanity.
A great example of that was covered during a session hosted by commerce leaders from American Express, Microsoft, and OpenAI. The panel agreed that payments companies and merchants will need to align on universal standards for purchasing flows with clearly defined responsibilities between the agent, purchaser, and merchant. This alignment will be essential to preventing fraud and distinguishing between legitimate disputes, friendly fraud, and unauthorized activity by AI.
Takeaway: As AI drives new kinds of interactions, platforms and financial institutions must build identity and fraud systems that can verify both human and AI entities. Otherwise, they risk losing revenue and user trust to increasingly hard-to-decipher fraud attacks.
3. Regional payment providers must address identity and risk management to compete on a global scale
Finally, cross-border payments were a major topic at Money20/20. Stablecoins and digital wallets have rapidly changed how money moves globally — increasing both the global transaction value and pace of payments.
But with this surge in payment activity comes new market dynamics and challenges for regional players to navigate. At the Persona booth, we met many regional payment providers, including companies from as far away as Vietnam and Venezuela. The implication is clear: Global compliance and trust are now critical priorities for both international and regional players alike.
We also saw more payment companies approach us with questions about KYC and KYB for fraud prevention, not just AML compliance. This is a strong signal of maturation for the payments space: Platforms are building for proactive risk management that starts earlier in the customer journey. As payments become faster and more global, verification must shift upstream to detect risk before it enters the system, not after.
Finally, momentum for solving digital identity challenges is accelerating. At the conference, our product team spoke with multiple payment and infrastructure innovators who are exploring new digital ID formats like mobile driver’s licenses or non-fungible verification (NFV) to streamline onboarding and reduce fraud.
These early adopters are setting the pace for what’s next in financial services. As digital identity standards evolve, every fintech will need a configurable verification strategy that can adapt quickly to new technologies, regulations, and user expectations.
Takeaway: As users adopt stablecoins and digital wallets, local payment providers face new compliance demands. The payment providers that will win are investing in scalable compliance and adaptable identity verification that works across borders, formats, and regulations.
The road ahead: building Fintech Spring together
The industry is ready for a collaborative Fintech Spring. The question isn’t whether fintech can coexist with traditional finance, but how quickly the industry can build shared infrastructure that continues to expand financial access.
At Persona, we're excited to support this evolution by helping fintech companies verify identities, prevent fraud, and build trust at every stage of the customer journey. Interested in learning more about how Persona supports fintech companies with KYC, KYB, and fraud prevention? Contact our team or explore our fintech solutions.
