Reflections from Money20/20 Europe 2025

Money20/20 Europe has always offered a useful lens into where FinTech is heading. But this year, the conversation felt different—less about the next product launch, more about the foundational shifts underway. 

Whether in AI, compliance, digital assets, or embedded finance, the signal was consistent: the industry is moving past experimentation and into infrastructure. Capabilities once seen as optional are becoming embedded requirements—and the platforms enabling them are quietly becoming critical.

From investor briefings to founder discussions, the focus was less on hype and more on distribution, defensibility, and integration. The themes that emerged weren’t just directional—they pointed to where long-term value is likely to concentrate. 

This write-up draws together those themes, with a view toward what they mean for private equity: where infrastructure is being quietly standardised and where the next generation of scalable, durable FinTech businesses are taking shape. 

AI was ubiquitous at Money20/20 Europe–underwriting agents, transaction monitors, real-time support copilots. But if there was one clear signal for investors, it’s this: AI has shifted from being a source of competitive advantage to becoming a basic expectation. 

The market is no longer rewarding companies simply for deploying AI. It is rewarding those that apply it with specificity, speed, and trustworthiness in regulated workflows. In lending, that means explainable models linked to credit bureau integrations. In wealth management, it means personalisation that complies with suitability requirements. In onboarding, it means sub-60 second identity verification with low false positives and regulatory assurance. 



That is the real insight: AI is not creating new winners–it is accelerating divergence between firms that have industrialised it within their domain and those still speaking in generalities. 

For private equity, the focus should not be on who has the most advanced models, but rather on who has successfully embedded AI into regulated commercial channels, and made it stick. 

2. The Infrastructure Layer Is Being Rewritten – One Function at a Time 

As embedded finance reshapes the customer interface, another quiet transformation is underway: the unbundling and rebuilding of core infrastructure, one specialised function at a time. This isn’t about full-stack replacements. It’s about modular, API-native providers solving foundational problems across banking, insurance, wealth, and capital markets, one function at a time–and becoming indispensable in the process. 

Token.io powers open banking payments and data access across Europe. Hawk AI is applying explainable AI to transaction monitoring in regulated banking workflows. Akur8 brings automated, regulator-aligned pricing optimisation to insurers. Finbourne helps asset managers and exchanges unify pricing, analytics, and data workflows. 

These platforms aren’t replacing core systems–they’re threading through them. What makes them compelling isn’t breadth, but depth: the more embedded they become, the harder they are to displace. 

For private equity, the attraction is clear. These firms offer infrastructure-grade economics–high retention, sticky workflows, and low marginal cost of expansion. They’re not tactical vendors. They’re becoming the connective layer underpinning the next decade of financial software. 

3. Compliance Is Becoming Infrastructure 

This year’s regulatory discourse–spanning MiCA, DORA, and Open Finance–reflected a deeper shift: compliance is no longer a tick-the-box exercise. It is fast becoming an infrastructure challenge. 

Traditionally, banks have treated regulation as an obligation; implementing fragmented, one-off solutions to appease compliance. But as Open Banking transitions to Open Finance, and as real-time payments and digital identity frameworks take hold, it has become evident that foundational capabilities–consent management, data portability, audit trails, KYC–must be rearchitected for scale and integration.

This has created space for a new generation of RegTech platforms. Firms such as Oscilar and ChainComply are not chasing narrow use cases, they are building embedded compliance layers across financial services workflows. Their edge is not just AI or UX either. Their edge lies in being API-native, privacy-first, and integration-ready across banks, wealth platforms, insurers, and payment networks. 

For investors, these are not product bolt-ons. They are becoming structural components of the modern FS stack. The opportunity lies in backing vendors who can operate at the intersection of regulation, product, and engineering–and become the de facto compliance infrastructure for complex financial environments. 

4. Embedded Finance: From Integration to Margin Ownership 

The first phase of embedded finance was all about plumbing: Who could plug in quickly, offer clean APIs, and help non-banks launch financial products–that time has passed. What is emerging now is a more strategic phase: one centred on distribution, margin control, and ownership of the customer relationship. 

Fintechs such as Klarna (expanding into debit cards), Bunq (targeting the US market), and Stripe (experimenting with stablecoin-based flows) are all aiming to own more of the financial stack–not merely enable transactions. But more interesting still is the role of the infrastructure enablers behind them. Episode Six, for instance, enables card issuance without ceding economics to legacy processors. Silverflow allows digital-first merchants to route payments directly to card networks–removing intermediaries and reclaiming both data and margin.

This evolution changes the nature of defensibility. In embedded finance, the winners will not be those with the slickest front-end API, but those that allow their clients to embed financial services while retaining control–over the brand, the economics, and the experience. 

For private equity, this is where the next layer of infrastructure value will emerge–not at the integration layer, but at the orchestration layer, where economics are shaped and margin captured. 

5. Stablecoins Are Edging Into the Financial Core 

The crypto hype may have faded, but stablecoins are gaining traction–not as speculative assets, but as functional tools for liquidity management, cross-border settlement, and treasury optimisation. 

What’s changed is the calibre of participants. Institutions such as Standard Chartered and BNP Paribas are experimenting with tokenised money market funds and blockchain-based settlement–not as PR moves, but to address real inefficiencies in traditional financial workflows. Add MiCA’s regulatory clarity, and institutional-grade stablecoin rails are beginning to take shape.



The investable opportunity lies not in the assets themselves, but in the infrastructure around them. Platforms enabling programmable liquidity, tokenised asset servicing, or stablecoin-based FX–all within regulated frameworks–are solving horizontal problems across capital markets, payments, and wealth. 

For private equity, the implication is clear: this isn’t about crypto exposure. It’s about backing middleware firms that bridge tokenised and traditional finance—safely, scalably, and without the branding baggage. Those enabling regulated use cases, rather than speculative trading, will become core enablers of the next generation of financial infrastructure. 

In Closing: Backing the Builders, Not the Buzz 

Money20/20 Europe 2025 made one thing clear: the future of FinTech belongs to those shaping infrastructure — not chasing features. 

For private equity, that means placing less emphasis on top-line growth stories, and more on embedded reach, distribution leverage, and defensibility-by-design. The platforms others choose to build on (whether that’s orchestration layers for A2A payments in banking, portfolio data fabrics in capital markets, embedded suitability engines in wealth, or modular claims automation in insurance) will compound faster, scale more efficiently, and become increasingly difficult to displace. 

From wealth firms’ re-platforming around open APIs to insurers embedding pricing engines into digital journeys, infrastructure choices are no longer merely technical. They are strategic decisions with material commercial consequences. 

These firms may not be the loudest brands in market — but they are fundamentally underwriting the next phase of financial services.