Day two of Money 20/20 Europe 2025 at the RAI in Amsterdam served up more industry insight and strategies across its six stages to an audience which included a few bleary heads after Tuesday’s street party at the easy-to-say Reguliersdwarsstraat.
From challenger to champion….
Monzo Group CEO TS Anil opened the morning’s proceedings on the Na.i.ture Stage, sharing the bank’s journey as it marks its 10th anniversary and celebrates a second consecutive year of profitability.
He talked about Monzo’s customer-centric approach to innovation, evidenced by products like a gambling block and call status tool.
“We make our money because we embed ourselves in the daily lives of our customers,” he said. “Our mission statement is making money work for everyone. We want to help customers meet all of their financial needs.”
And he discussed Monzo’s global expansion plans and answered the obligatory question about when it plans to float.
“We deeply believe that every part of the world needs a Monzo, a place for your financial life that inspires solving all of the problems that you have, but also inspires the love and delight that comes on the back of that. We’ve made no secret of the fact that Ireland is our entry point into Europe and it would be really exciting to come and talk to you as soon as we can about what that strategy looks like and which markets and when do we get there.
“We will be a great public company one day but that’s just not our focus right now. We’re focused on scaling the business.”
Getting collaboration right
Over on the Horizon stage, Monika Liikamaa, co-founder of Enfuce, gave a typically energetic presentation on why collaboration is everything. And she didn’t mince words when addressing the payments sector’s obsession with ‘free’ everything:
“Why Should everything be free? Because infrastructure isn’t free, compliance isn’t free. So, why do we as consumers think that payments should be free?”
Her point? Let’s be honest about costs and remember that reliable, inclusive payment systems don’t come from magic, they come from working together.
“We have built this narrative around disruption. We have ‘banks are the legacy and the dinosaurs’ or ‘the fintechs are going to disrupt’. And let’s be honest, that’s bullshit. But in the end, collaboration is what matters.”
Tackling fraud together
Collaboration was also a key theme in a panel on scams and fraud, particularly ticket resale scams, with the panel agreeing that working together is the only way to beat it.
Nicola Harding from We Fight Fraud highlighted how criminals exploit familiar processes, while Rich Bromley from Monzo described how they use data and real-time prompts to help customers protect themselves.
Harding commented: “Collaboration has to be meaningful. It has to be on time, and that time is now.”
While Bromley, said: “The only way we can really meaningfully reduce fraud, not just in the UK or in Europe, but globally, is through sectors being compelled to come together, to actually really be incentivised to address that problem at root cause.”
Programmable privacy
In The Fintech Times’ pop-up TV studio, we chatted to Fahmi Syed, president of the Midnight Foundation, who spoke about how its blockchain project aims to bring real-world adoption beyond the hype of crypto tokens.
“This originally began as a research project… Why has blockchains and the technology behind it not really seen real world adoption? Why has the masses not come, the large enterprises not come?”
Fahmi explained how its approach combines the benefits of public and private blockchains: “Our blockchain is neither public nor private. It’s not in either camp… We give programmable privacy so individuals can have both a public state, a private state, and selected disclose information around that state.”
He noted how programmable privacy could change the way businesses handle assets and data: “We believe the use case of those elements in midnight enhances them, opens up to large enterprises and large real world adoption.”
To pay by bank or not to pay by bank?
While pay by bank continues to gain traction in the UK, it has been around for the best part of a decade, and it remains largely underused elsewhere in the world, particularly in e-commerce. Could it be time to call it a day and move on?
We watched on as Lisa Scott, chief strategy officer at TrueLayer, took to the Na.i.ture Stage to debate this very question, sharing five reasons businesses argue against open banking payments.
Firstly, she explains that many businesses say their customers simply aren’t asking for it. “We’ll be waiting a very long time for customers to be the ones that challenge this. I think we know from any new payment method that adoption is driven by merchants.”
“The second big challenge is that there isn’t product market fit in e-commerce,” Scott continued. “But we are seeing examples that oppose this. Ryanair is live with pay by bank across seven different markets in Europe. It is actively promoting this with homepage banners that educate its customers about the payment method. As part of research we did with Juniper Research, we found that out of 300 e-commerce with over $1million revenue, 80 per cent have pay by bank in their roadmap – with 90 per cent of these planning to start work in the next 12 months.”
Finally, Scott revealed that a common misconception about pay by bank is that it doesn’t offer the same consumer protections as other payment methods. “To clarify, pay by bank does not have chargebacks. It does have many consumer protections, and merchants want to put protections in place themselves, so that if anything goes wrong with a customer order, they can make good with that customer to retain a positive relationship.”
Money, trees and beaches
As day two came to a close, attendees headed to the Money Beach Club and the Electric Garden Party for an evening of house and disco anthems with DJ Annie Mac, and some glittery dancers, as well as the chance to pick their own tunes on a jukebox that also raised funds for planting trees.
Expect more bleary heads on Thursday morning…
