November 04, 2022



For its 10th anniversary, the largest Fintech conference Money 20/20 took place in Las Vegas with more than 11,500 participants from 3,000 different companies to discuss the future of the financial services industry.


Big tech players and large banks are increasingly working together
 

This 2022 edition saw many different announcements between tech giants and traditional financial services players.

Wells Fargo and Google were on stage announcing the launch of the bank new virtual assistant service called Fargo that will be powered by Google Cloud AI. This will be a mobile app with a “smart chat” function that will offer personalized services and advice to consumer. 2/3 of the young Americans declared in a recent poll commissioned by Wells Fargo with the contribution of Ipsos they would prefer to interact with a virtual assistant instead of calling the call centers. For the most sophisticated questions that Google powered service will not be able to answer, human agent will have to take the lead within the chat and answer the questions asked. In the future, Wells Fargo will add a Spanish option and more sophisticated capabilities around budgeting, debt management and smart alerts thanks to partner of choice in this field, Google. 

Meta (new name of Facebook since last year) was also on stage with their head of commerce and fintech Stephane Kasriel to announce that JP Morgan will add the Meta Pay option to its merchant checkout and help the tech player consumer to use the payment method in their shopping experience outside of Whatsapp, Facebook or Instagram. Also in the payment world, Venmo which is a popular payment app used by many Americans that was acquired by Paypal a few years ago will also be accepted by Amazon as a payment option, showing how Amazon is slowly opening its realm to fintech players after a partnership with Affirm on “Buy Now, Pay Later” option in 2021.


ESG and climate change topics on the agenda for fintech players

« In LATAM, financial inclusion starts with ESG » panel - Hans Koning from IFC, Chris Canavero from Nubank & Paula Arregui from Mercado Libre 

The contribution from fintech players to Sustainable Development Goals as defined by the UN is something that is more and more discussed at the largest fintech conference in the world.

During a LATAM panel where the e-commerce pioneer Mercado Libre described how they were empowering small businesses across the continent to develop their activities with digital payment and credit, Chris Canavaro from NuBank shared that beyond the consumer obsession they had to drive their roadmap, their North star was helping individuals to better access financial services. Nubank helped more than 5 million Brazilians open for the first time a banking account . Their financial health agenda is ambitious, the leading LATAM fintech player and largest neobank in the world with 70 million clients across Brazil, Mexico and Columbia is multiplying the products to empower their clients and help them on their financial health journey. They launched for example this summer a piggybank service  called« Caixinhas » in portuguese (meaning piggy bank) that helps consumers save for a goal like their children education or invest in real estates and 2 million of them already started to use the service.

Fintech and climate change topics were also visible during the conference and in the exhibition hall with different players like the Swedish Doconomy, New-Zealander Cogo and Spanish Clarity AI which were all looking to convert American financial institutions to adopt their services.