Last week the Monetize360 team attended the Money20/20 conference in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Money20/20 brings together some of the brightest minds in FinTech, Financial Services and Revenue Operations to discuss the latest trends, technologies and best practices to help drive revenue and improve operational performance.
The event itself is huge, bringing together some 12,000+ financial and revenue professionals for an unrivaled educational and networking opportunity. I never cease to be amazed by the pace of growth and change in this space, and Money20/20 is only further validation of that.
Here are a few of my observations from the event:
1) The FinTech space continues to grow at a massive rate
Money20/20 is a leading indicator of how quickly the FinTech space is growing. Take a quick spin around the massive exhibitor floor, and you’ll see solutions ranging from crypto to blockchain to digital payments to virtual banking and more. Having spent a portion of my career in both the start-up and investor community, it was both fascinating and exciting to see the financial industry embracing FinTech and all the benefits it has to offer with gusto.
2) RevOps is taking a lead role in defining monetization strategy
90% of the conversations that I had at the event were with a revenue leader – typically someone in RevOps – not a CFO or operations leader. That honestly wasn’t terribly surprising considering that’s who we often engage with on a day-to-day basis. Revenue leaders have become the unofficial right hand to the CFO, often taking a lead role in conversations around pricing and billing improvements and efficiencies.
3) Traditional banking is finally ready to shake things up
Banks are finally coming to grips with the fact that the mainframe systems that they have to date been able to MacGyver to support the constantly changing needs of their business, just won’t hold anymore. The complexities of modern-day banking require agility and flexibility – two things that legacy mainframe systems simply can’t support. It’s time to move on, they know it, and they are ready for it. FinTech is ready for it too – a new day for FI is on the horizon.
4) API solutions are everywhere
The number of API solutions that we saw on the exhibitor floor was mind-boggling – they were absolutely everywhere. This is definitely a solution space that’s having a moment. It presents a particularly interesting opportunity for financial institutions who have been looking for a way to expose data-as-a-service in a secure manner for ages. This opens up all sorts of exciting possibilities.
5) Embedded Finance – the new kid on the block
It’s becoming more and more common for non-banking institutions to include financial services such as wallets, bank accounts and lending services, in their product portfolio. Companies who are taking the leap into FinServ include retail, telcos, insurance providers and software companies just to name a few. The shift to usage-based models is partially responsible for this development - as those models continue to take hold, we’ll see embedded finance offerings do the same. We’ll see Banking-As-A-Service (BaaS) offerings become more commonplace as well.
There were so many other great takeaways from this event – more than I can cover in a single blog post – so we’ll be sharing more of them in the coming weeks.
If you went to Money 20/20 this year, I’d love to hear your thoughts. What were some of your key takeaways? What did you hear that surprised you? Drop your thoughts in the comments!