The dominant energy in Amsterdam wasn't about potential. It was about execution. Fintech isn't positioning itself as a disruptor anymore; it's become the infrastructure. As someone who has worked on the infrastructure side for some time it was striking how many companies that used to feel like challengers now feel like incumbents. Not in terms of culture or speed, just in terms of success and scale. It is an obvious statement to make but ‘we made it!’ I was pleased though that the DNA remains and everyone I spoke to was laser focused on the next thing. This wasn't ideation either. Projects are either in late stage discovery, production or they are live.
The recurring themes across every track reflected that shift: AI, agentic commerce, stablecoins, orchestration, new rails, and regulation weren't presented as future-state ideas. They were actively being solved.
The striking thing is that there's a broad consensus on the destination. Everyone agrees that payments are becoming multi-rail, intelligent, invisible, and global. The debate is entirely about the "how." That gap between shared destination and contested path is exactly where the interesting commercial decisions get made.
Stablecoins dominated the agenda, but the "how do they reach commerce" question remained open
Stablecoins were everywhere. Conviction on the rail is now mainstream. But the conversation that kept surfacing was the one that matters most to us: where do real consumer and merchant volumes actually show up?
The debate has moved past "are stablecoins real" to "how do they reach commerce without forcing everyone to rebuild." That's the conversation we want to lead. The answer, in our view, is that stablecoins win when they stop being a parallel system someone has to operate separately, and start behaving like just another payment method in an existing PSP stack. An APM that plugs in, not a new architecture that replaces. The user experience, safety & rigour around the assets also need to level up if adoption is to continue its aggressive trajectory. The assets value has been proven but the delivery of the asset as a service is still a very mixed bag.
The future is multi-rail, and the edge is orchestration
Nobody in Amsterdam was betting on a single rail. The consensus is clear: cards, A2A, and emerging digital rails coexist. That's not a transitional state; it's the permanent state.
What follows from that is important. If all the rails exist, competitive advantage doesn't come from moving money faster. It comes from orchestration: data, control of the customer journey, and the ability to route intelligently across rails in real time. The edge is in the layer above the rails, not in the rails themselves.
Crypto and stablecoins slot into that picture naturally, as long as they behave like a well-integrated APM rather than demanding their own dedicated stack.
Trust is becoming its own infrastructure layer
In a world of agentic purchases, better deepfakes, and instant, less-visible fraud, the question shifts. It's no longer just about how money moves. It's about how trust moves with it.
The fraud-decisioning framing you heard a lot in Amsterdam is part of that, but I think it's incomplete. Trust also comes from familiarity. A user paying with a wallet they already trust is a trust signal. Compliance built into existing PSP frameworks, rather than bolted on afterward, is a trust signal. The winners in this environment aren't necessarily the ones with the best fraud model. They're the ones who make compliance and familiarity invisible features of the experience.
Regulation as a moat, not a ceiling
The regulator-versus-fintech framing that dominated conversations five years ago has largely dissolved. What I heard in Amsterdam was coexistence: regulatory certainty and standardisation presented as the bedrock for adoption, and more interestingly, as a strategic barrier to entry.
That reframing matters. Compliance-ready-by-design isn't overhead. It's a feature, and in time it becomes a moat. The companies treating MiCA, travel rule compliance, and licensed infrastructure as a differentiator rather than a cost center are building something harder to replicate than any product feature.
AI and agentic commerce: still early, but the rails question is real
AI in payments is still largely experimental. The shift from assistive to decision-making, in fraud, credit, and operations, is underway but incomplete. That's where most of the conversation sat.
The more interesting question, and the one I kept pushing on in conversations, is what happens when agents start buying on our behalf. That requires a settlement and identity layer that actually works: clear authorization, accountability for who is behind the transaction, and predictable settlement. That's a rails problem, not a model problem.
If agents are making purchases, they need infrastructure that knows who authorized the spend, settles reliably, and can be audited. We're watching that space closely as we think about agentic payments and payouts.
Payments are becoming invisible, which makes the infrastructure harder, not simpler
The user expectation now is seamless, real-time, personalized payments on every transaction, while simultaneously managing cost, risk, and compliance. That's a demanding brief.
Invisible doesn't mean simple underneath. It means the orchestration and settlement work has to disappear from the user's view entirely. Payouts and settlement flows are a significant part of that picture, and the teams who solve the back-end complexity elegantly are the ones whose products feel effortless at the surface.
The fundamentals haven't changed
Whatever the rails, whatever the model, this industry runs on relationships. That was true twenty years ago (so I am told 🙂), and it was true in every conversation I had at Money20/20.
The next decade won't be won by whoever moves money fastest. It'll be won by whoever makes money move where commerce actually happens, with trust built in, compliance baked through, and infrastructure that works for the people operating it, not just the companies selling it.
That's the bet I made when I moved to WalletConnect. Amsterdam reminded me why I made it.