Money20/20 USA Through Ellie's Eyes: Volume Deux

By Ellie Kirkman, FF News host, Money20/20 USA

This is my second and final dispatch from Money20/20 USA, covering days two and three. Day two was a crazy one. I sat down for nine interviews, back to back, from an early start on the show floor to a sunset finish in a suite on the 34th floor of The Venetian. Meanwhile the rest of the FF News crew were filming in our own suite, which looked amazing all day.

Our interviews today: BNY, Abrigo, ElevenLabs, NMI, Paymentology (twice, once with Wio), Aduna, Ballerine and Payroc. Three themes kept coming up.

1. Compliance is the trust layer

If day one was about trust when a bot does the buying, day two was about what that trust is built on. In every single interview I ran, compliance and regulation came up. Not as a box to tick, but as the thing that has to be super tight before anything else works.

We started early with Carl Slabicki of BNY, and his story was a lovely reminder that a long history and fast change can sit side by side. BNY was founded by Alexander Hamilton, and today it's working on tokenisation, central bank digital currencies and AI across its services. Its AI platform is even called Eliza, after Hamilton's wife. What a nice nod to its history while it keeps pace with change. (BNY's tokenisation work isn't theoretical, either: last week it completed a tokenised US Treasury triparty repo with Citadel Securities, settling in minutes rather than T+1.)

From there it was down to the Abrigo booth with Ravi Nemalikanti and Laura Broderick, fresh from filming their episode in our suite. This was the shorter, punchier version, all about how Abrigo helps banks and credit unions stay ahead of financial crime, with compliance as the undercurrent running through everything.

2. Nobody has to build it all themselves

The other big thread of the day was partnership. It feels like the industry is finally, finally working out that you don't need to build everything yourself. The power of collaboration is huge, and I think it's only going to do good for the industry.

• Steve Pinado of NMI was brilliant at getting his points across short and precise. It was back to fintech's payments roots: NMI's acquisition of Dwolla, and what bringing account-to-account payments alongside cards means for the businesses it serves.

• Jeff Parker of Paymentology and Jayesh Patel of Wio riffed off each other so well. It was such an organic conversation about expanding in the Middle East, and what their partnership means for customers and for payment rails across the region.

• I then sat down with Jeff on his own to hear about Paymentology's launch into the US market in Q1. There's no better place to talk about that than Vegas.

And then there was ElevenLabs, a lovely change of pace. I filmed with Lauren, who was super clued up and so friendly (she also sent me home with some ElevenLabs golf balls, which my dad is going to love). It was a different conversation from your usual fintech one, focused on AI voice, speech and customer service, but it's very much part of our world: plenty of fintechs now build on ElevenLabs. And they're clearly investing in being seen here. Conn Byrne at Payroc told me he'd spotted loads of ElevenLabs-wrapped cabs outside.

3. Verification goes way beyond KYC

Yesterday I wrote about Know Your Agent. Today the verification conversation got even wider: know your customer, know your business, and in a way, know your merchant and how merchants actually operate.

Peter Arbitter of Aduna talked about partnering with mobile network operators to make verification seamless. One-time passcodes and SIM swapping were fairly foreign concepts to me. We all know fraud happens through mobile phones, but the idea of someone hijacking your number by swapping your SIM was eye-opening. Being able to check whether that's happened, whether it was five years, five weeks, five days or even five minutes ago, changes what verification looks like on a device. Aduna is definitely one to watch.

Nathan Joel of Ballerine, freshly named a winner in the Startup Growth Stage category at the Money20/20 Money Awards, brought it right back round to AI agents. Ballerine's Workforce platform puts teams of AI agents to work on financial crime, and inevitably we talked fraud too. Short and sweet, and a great conversation.

We finished with Conn Byrne of Payroc in the Payroc suite. Conn had just come off the golf course, so was slightly rosy, but his answers were great. His team were amazing, very American, full of energy, and loved our accents. Their hospitality was fantastic, and it's always a good time when the answers are good.

Behind the scenes

A personal highlight today was getting more involved on the production side: checking the angles, making sure the frames were right. I studied photography at college and went to design school at university, but I've never had the chance to do production in my day job, so doing it in a real industry setting has been really fun. Day one I had plenty of help from Matt, Dylan and Ethan. Day two felt a lot more natural.

The FF News team, as ever, kept me fed, hydrated and on track through a pretty relentless day. A huge thank you to them, and to everyone who sat down with us.

Day three

Day three was a gentler one for me. Cait and the crew filmed the final few interviews, and I spent it on the show floor with Dylan, handing out magazines and catching up with the people we'd met over the week.

That's a wrap on Money20/20 USA through my eyes. Thank you for following along, and to everyone who made it such a brilliant few days.