LAS VEGAS–Across a variety of topics, here is just some of what was said, observed and predicted during the Money 20/20 conference.
The Shifting Role of Financial Institutions
During a session that highlighted how the health of the U.S. economy, evolving customer demands, and technologies like AI and stablecoins are shifting, William Demchak, chairman and CEO of PNC Financial Services Group, said so, too, is the role a financial institution must play in the next era of banking.
“With retail banking, historically, you’d move share in basis points over years. It was hard to do. What’s happened in the last handful of years of the big players have proven through ubiquitous presence and good products that you can actually move, share in a material way,” said Demchak. “We are doing that also. You do it through client service. You do it through presence. You do it through great products, and you do it through caring. You know the human is still involved in banking and finance. We’re going to talk about agentic. I think the human is always going to be involved in banking and finance, but that’s our pursuit.”
AI That Sees Money Before It Moves
During a session titled, “The AI That Sees Money Before it Moves, which explored how artificial intelligence is turning payment data into predictive intelligence with agentic commerce, Stavan Parikh, VP/GM payments with Google, observed, “The trust in which a merchant, a seller, and a buyer can actually put into an agent when they actually show up is going to be an incredibly important thing we need to get done.”
White House View on Next Five Years
During a session titled, “Clarity Act or Ambiguity: The Bill Redrawing the Financial Map, Patrick Witt, White House, executive director of the President’s Council of Advisors for Digital Assets) was asked what he thinks the next five years will look like, and he responded, “I think the SEC and CFTC are going to fill the void as much as they possibly can. You’re going to see the integration of blockchain into our existing traditional financial institutions, and the companies in the crypto space that have gotten off the ground, and that have scale, are going to scale up. These products are going to become useful, reliable, and safe on their own as the market regulates itself and certain companies establish themselves in this space.
“Once it gets in the hands of users, traditional finance institutions, and other companies that have a use for this technology and products, it’s going to be extremely hard to take it out of their hands,” Witt continued. “So, I would hope the politicization of the technology abates as it becomes a part of the fabric of our financial system. It’s going to remake our financial system, but it’s going to take time.”
Tokenized Equities, Risk and Cowboys
During a discussion titled, “Building the 24/7 Market Structure for Tokenized Equities,” Arjun Sethi, co-CEO of Kraken, told the meeting that adoption must be driven from the bottom up, with existing U.S. equity issuers moving on-chain to create utility beyond institutional participation.
“The biggest issue is that if you only cater to institutions, you’re wanting to build for them and forcing everyone else to adapt,” Sethi said. “Even with crypto, it was retail, then bottoms-up. Institutions came last because flow was there. They need to be able to figure out how to arbitrage. But building for institutions, you’re going to fail.
“My point is, what is going to happen in the tokenized equities space, you’ve got to have bottoms-up companies listing first,” he continued. “The only way to do that is to get current US issuers on chain. It’s scary and disruptive, but it’s the only way to move forward. In the case of deleveraging, how do we absorb the risk? I don’t like traditional markets cause of the financial crisis, and because of fraud. And then somehow, we have the most transparent systems that are being called ‘cowboys’.”
The New Architecture of Payments
During a panel discussion titled, “Intelligence Meets Infrastructure: Agentic AI, Digital Assets & the New Architecture of Payments,” which explored how digital assets and stablecoins are improving cross-border payments, settlement and liquidity management, while examining the remaining infrastructure, Scott Meadows of Coinbase said, “We’ve gone from an environment where you were solely focused on read-only and information gathering to now enabling a lot of the agents to be able to actually transact on your behalf. The key question that we’ve been building with a lot of the agency partners is: what does that control environment look like? Is it human in the loop? Is it autonomous with predefined guardrails? Is it fully autonomous? What are the bounds in which you operate those things?
“And from our perspective today, the spectrum is quite wide in terms of which sort of agentic platform you’re talking to and what their risk appetite is,” Meadows continued. “So, you have some where it’s very tightly controlled, and others where they’re a little bit more risk-on, and they’re willing to sort of let it be more fully autonomous. So, it’s on businesses like ours that help service that use case to build in the optionality and controls for both the agent and the end-user.”
