EXCLUSIVE: “Ten Years Old, All Grown Up” – Bryony Naylor, Money20/20 in ‘The Fintech Magazine’

James Grant hangs on to the fintech Ferris wheel and takes a spin through a decade of Money20/20 Europe with the show’s Bryony Naylor as she prepares for Amsterdam 2026

In April 2016, 3,000 bankers, founders and tech bros descended on Copenhagen’s Bella Center to attend the first ever Money20/20 Europe. Gracing the stage were representatives of a then little-known Dutch outfit called Adyen, Klarna’s Sebastian Siemiatkowski and Transferwise’s Kristo Käärmann, blinking in disbelief from just securing a $33million round, backed by Richard Branson and Peter Thiel.

At the time, Adyen was two years away from a $16billion-size Euronext IPO, Transferwise hadn’t yet become ‘Wise’, and Klarna was a long way from becoming a household name.

“We were looking at some of the top 30 unicorns for each region,” says Bryony Naylor, VP Europe at Money20/20, summing up the whole decade in one research finding.

“For Europe especially, we’d had all the top 30 speaking on stage from 2016-17, all having just done a series A or series B. The growth is just phenomenal. The names we have on
stage in 2026, versus 2016 – they’re now these huge, huge companies.”

This June, the show comes to Amsterdam for its 10th European edition, and the lineup feels a little like a homecoming celebration. Adyen’s Pieter van der Does is back. Klarna’s Siemiatkowski is on the keynote stage. A long-running Money20/20 wish list ticked off.

BBVA, formerly a regular attendee, also returns with a bang.

“I’m really excited about them being back to speak on the keynote stage,” Naylor says. “Especially as it’s our 10th show, it feels like a fitting kind of moment.”

Around them sits the current generation, including Revolut Bank UK’s Francesca Carlesi, fresh from having its long awaited licence fully authorised, and Taktile’s Maik Taro Wehmeyer. The faces and the scale may have changed, but the keen-eyed observers can expect some things to remain set in stone: a busy agenda of pitching, networking and working the room, all undercut with the hungry vibes of founders who haven’t slept soundly since the last raise.

For Naylor, the tone of Money20/20 has always been what sets it apart from its near-peer competitors – a willingness to embrace the outrageous, including The Fintech Magazine’s first Payments Race – a literal dash for cash (and card, phone, gold and crypto).

“It ended with whoever got there first running onto the stage. I was like, oh my god, this is like no other event – we’re in fintech but we are making it fun, making it about the clients. This isn’t a traditional trade show. From that moment on, I was hooked.”

That doesn’t mean M20/20 doesn’t apply itself to some really serious issues. Fintech itself has grown up, after all, and growing up has meant losing some youthful swagger. The 2020 hype cycle around BNPL has cooled to room temperature. Crypto has been declared dead and reborn at least twice, your view dependant on how crammed-full of meme coins your Nano Ledger is.

Open banking turned out to be a slower revolution than the slide decks promised. The challengers, including Monzo, N26 and Revolut, are no longer insurgents but in the process of becoming the adults in the room. This has changed the profile of the overall audience.

“We’ve seen a brilliant lift in the number of banks coming to the show,” Naylor says. “That’s been a big push for us.”

Infact, one session this year on the Orbital stage goes by the gloriously immodest title ‘How big banks are rewiring the future of finance,’ featuring Barclays and Dandelion, while another session on commercial payments puts Visa’s Lucy Demery on the same stage as Revolut Business’s James Gibson, which, once upon a time, may all have triggered a small fire in HR.

“Five years ago, we wouldn’t even be talking about banks writing fintech history,” Naylor says. “Now, we’ve seen a convergence happen.”

Some of that is technology catching up with promise. A decade ago, ‘digital transformation’ for a tier-one bank meant ripping out a core banking system in a multi-year, multi-hundred- million-dollar programme that frequently ended in litigation. Modularisation, overlay platforms and API-first architecture have made the same job cheaper, faster and, crucially, less terrifying. The rest is just cultural.

Banks that once viewed challengers as existential threats now treat them either as partners or, increasingly, spin out their own and quietly hope nobody notices the family resemblance. The result is a fintech ecosystem where the most interesting conversations happen between people who used to spend networking drinks pointedly avoiding each other. That convergence is the connective tissue across the show’s four 2026 content pillars.

‘AI and the Agentic Age’ looks at autonomous systems making real financial decisions – not the chatbot-with-a-CV variety, but production-grade AI that approves loans, prices risk and rebalances portfolios while you sleep. ‘The Great Rebundling’ is the long-overdue response to a decade of fragmentation: after years of every fintech doing one thing brilliantly, the centre of gravity has shifted back toward integrated, full-stack platforms, much to the satisfaction of users who would prefer not to manage 17 apps just to get paid.

‘Money Stack Rewired’ covers stablecoins and the new infrastructure now graduating from pilot to production, while ‘Regulation in the Fast Lane’ promises to add a bit of healthy zip to an area that might once have had the biggest yawn factor.

All four pillars converge on the new Intersection Stage, the show’s third-iteration home for the tradFi-meets-DeFi conversations the industry can no longer pretend aren’t happening. The backstory to one session, ‘Are stablecoins revolutionary or rhetoric?’ is interesting. One of the panellists, Naylor notes, was called out at the Asia show last year for dismissing stablecoins as a ‘stable con, and then had to kind of eat his words’. The European edition will presumably be his rematch.

Regulators, meanwhile, are no longer just polite extras. Policy20, the show’s closed-door programme of roundtables involving policymakers, regulators and a handful of senior private-sector voices, has seen a significant uptick in Middle East participation this year, the knock-on effect of Money20/20 absorbing the Fintech24 event in Saudi Arabia and rebranding it as Money20/20 Middle East.

“We’ve seen quite a big take-up of Middle East regulators in our Policy20 programme. It’ll be interesting to see how they take that back into the Middle East,” says Naylor. “Time and again,” she adds, “the ones that have the best experience at our event are the ones that engage with the Connections platform early and get their meeting schedules full.”

Which is a polite way of saying: the AI may now be agentic, the money stack may be rewired, the regulators may be in the fastlane, but the deals still get done over coffee and the occasional Heineken.

The Adyens, Klarnas and Wises now occupy the keynote rooms they once queued to get into, and the future of today’s up-and-comers are in the breakout rooms, hoping to catch some of that updraft.

Ten years from now, one of them will probably be the headline act at the 20th show, talking about innovations even the most plucky editorial couldn’t envisage now. Until then, grab a beer and start chatting – tomorrow’s headliner might be standing right beside you.

THE ALUMNI EFFECT

Adyen

Spoke at the very first Money20/20 Europe in Copenhagen in 2016, then valued at a charming $2.3billion. Went public on Euronext Amsterdam in June 2018 at a market cap of $16billion on day one. Now processes payments for Uber, Netflix, Spotify and Booking.com, it’s returning to the keynote stage this June.

Klarna

Sebastian Siemiatkowski announced a partnership with Modo on the Copenhagen stage in 2016, back when buy-now-pay-later still felt like a marketing decision rather than a regulatory question. The Swedish BNPL behemoth has since grown to more than 100 million users globally, with Siemiatkowski returning to the keynote in Amsterdam this year.

Wise

Then known as TransferWise. Co-founder Kristo Käärmann was at Copenhagen, having just raised $33million from Branson, Thiel and most of the PayPal mafia. The company rebranded in 2021, listed on the LSE the same year, and now moves around £9billion across borders every month for 16 million customers.

Zilch

Launched in London in late 2020 and hit double-unicorn status in 14 months, the fastest in European history. CEO Philip Belamant has been one of Money20/20 Europe’s most prolific repeat speakers across the decade.

Revolut

Barely 12 months old when Money20/20 Europe launched in 2016. Now Europe’s most valuable fintech. Revolut Bank UK’s CEO Francesca Carlesi headlines this year’s show with what comes next

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This article was published in The Fintech Magazine Issue #38, Page 06-07

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