Driving the Future of Fintech

Insights from Money20/20 USA 2024 and Consult Hyperion’s Legacy

The fintech landscape has undergone remarkable transformations over the past decade, with Money20/20 USA serving as a pivotal platform for showcasing industry innovations and setting trends. Each year, this premier conference gathers leaders, innovators, and thinkers to discuss the future of financial services. Reflecting on past themes such as cloud computing and blockchain, the 2024 event embraced Artificial Intelligence (AI) as the defining technology of the year.

A Look Back: Cloud, Blockchain, and Consult Hyperion’s Journey at Money20/20

Over the years, Money20/20 has highlighted significant trends that have shaped financial services. Cloud computing allowed institutions to scale operations, enhance customer experiences, and improve efficiency. Blockchain soon followed, presenting decentralized ledger systems that promised more transparency, security, and trust in financial transactions.

For Consult Hyperion, these advancements provided a natural landscape to showcase our expertise. Since our first year at Money20/20, we’ve been committed to the industry’s growth, contributing thought leadership and insights on technological evolution. Our journey at Money20/20 has been one of active participation, attendance and thought leadership. Year after year, we’ve witnessed—and contributed to—the shift in how technology redefines our industry.

2024: The AI-Driven Future of Fintech

This year, AI emerged as the main theme, emphasizing the next evolution in payments technology. Money20/20 USA 2024 was all about exploring AI’s current and future impact. From machine learning to natural language processing, the event demonstrated AI’s ability to drive personalized financial products, enhance security, and transform customer engagement.

Key highlights from this year’s conference included:

  • AI-Powered Customer Engagement: Many exhibitors showcased AI-driven chatbots and virtual assistants designed to streamline customer support and provide tailored advice. This shift towards personalized experiences is already making a significant impact, with AI enabling real-time, intelligent responses.
  • Enhanced Fraud Detection: Fraud prevention was another focal point, with sessions exploring how AI-driven models are detecting and mitigating fraud more effectively than ever. These solutions promise a safer environment for both financial institutions and consumers.
  • Personalized Financial Services: As AI grows more sophisticated, it allows for finely-tuned, data-driven offerings that meet individual needs. Financial products are now being tailored with unprecedented accuracy, improving customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Consult Hyperion’s Continued Commitment to Innovation

Consult Hyperion’s ongoing involvement at Money20/20 reflects our commitment to staying at the forefront of fintech. This year, we’re particularly excited about the potential AI brings to financial services and how it intersects with our expertise in secure payments and identity. As a key player in bridging technology with strategy, Consult Hyperion remains dedicated to guiding the industry through its next stages of digital transformation.

Dave Birch’s Panels on AI, Digital Identity, and Payments

Consult Hyperion’s own Dave Birch, known globally for his thought leadership in secure payment and identity systems, moderated two thought-provoking panels. Each session, focused on AI’s transformative potential in finance, illustrated how we can expect profound changes in secure identity, payments, and customer engagement.

  1. “Have My AI Call Your AI and Let’s Do Lunch” This forward-looking session explored the transformative potential of AI-driven B2B interactions within finance. Birch and his panelists, including Sophia Bantazidis from Citi, discussed how autonomous, AI-driven systems could negotiate and streamline transactions between organizations. Panelists noted that as AI continues to advance, it presents opportunities for improving efficiency in business interactions. However, the potential for AI-to-AI interactions also brings the need for a secure, reliable framework, particularly in digital identity, to ensure all parties’ integrity and security. Bantazidis highlighted the importance of ethical AI in finance and the role of digital identity frameworks to support responsible, trustworthy AI interactions. The discussion underscored that digital identity isn’t just a safeguard but a necessity for enabling safe, efficient AI-driven financial communications, allowing AI systems to engage securely in a trust-based environment.
  2. “The Real Disruption in Retail Financial Services: Customers Getting AI” Hosted on the exclusive “Off The Record” stage, which featured Chatham House rules and a locked-phone policy to encourage open dialogue, this session delved into a critical, often under-discussed topic: the growing role of AI in empowering consumers rather than just enhancing banks’ internal efficiencies. Birch set the stage for a candid conversation, highlighting that while it’s intriguing to explore how banks might use AI to streamline call centers or make marginally better credit decisions, the real disruption lies in customers having direct access to AI tools themselves. This shift represents a fundamental threat to the traditional retail banking model, with the increased intelligence of customers challenging financial institutions to adapt. Joining Birch in this conversation were Matt Harris from Bain Capital and Kirsty Rutter from Lloyds Banking Group, both bringing deep insights into how AI is empowering consumers with data and control previously inaccessible in the standard banking setup. Harris discussed how consumer-facing AI tools are pushing banks to refine their approach to customer engagement, while Rutter highlighted the role of secure, personalized digital identity in offering these AI-driven experiences safely and effectively. Together, the panelists concluded that financial institutions must develop robust strategies to stay relevant and competitive in the face of this new AI-enabled consumer intelligence.

Howard Hall’s Podcast with Lou Carlozo: A Legacy of Leadership in Payments and Digital Identity

In addition to these panel discussions, Consult Hyperion’s Howard Hall, was featured in a podcast with respected financial journalist Lou Carlozo. Hall shared how Consult Hyperion has been pioneering secure digital identity and payment solutions for decades, dating back to projects like the groundbreaking Hong Kong ID card. Hall discussed how this legacy of innovation continues to drive the company’s work in secure digital payments and identity, underscoring our commitment to building resilient infrastructures that adapt to changing regulatory landscapes and technology demands. Hall’s conversation with Carlozo highlighted that Consult Hyperion’s expertise in secure payments and identity frameworks isn’t simply a reaction to industry shifts; it’s a proactive approach that has evolved alongside the fintech ecosystem.

Charting the Path Forward

Money20/20 USA 2024 was a testament to the ongoing evolution within fintech, with AI taking center stage. As the industry advances, Consult Hyperion remains dedicated to contributing expertise in payments, secure digital identity, and emerging technologies that will shape the future. Our commitment to innovation and the fintech community continues, with a focus on building a safer, smarter, and more inclusive financial ecosystem.

What Exactly Is A Smart Wallet?

pexels-photo-887751.jpeg

A wallet is a way of organising things. My Apple Wallet, just like my real wallet, doesn’t have any cash in it. It has credit cards, debit cards, loyalty cards, vaccination records, boarding passes, train tickets and driving licences (Apple have just gone live with their driving licence and state in Arizona). These things are all held independently in the wallet: they don’t talk to each other and they don’t share data with each other. They are also, as you will have noticed, mostly about identity, not money.

Apple Finally Enables Payment Card Acceptance on iPhone

person-woman-hand-space.jpg

Contactless Card Acceptance

Solutions to enable Android phones to be used to accept EMV contactless card payments without requiring additional hardware have been around for a while.  We’ve been advising and helping our clients architect, secure, build and certify SoftPOS solutions for the last 5 years.  However, this has not been possible on iOS devices, until now.  Speculation that Apple was looking to add contactless payment card acceptance support to iPhone grew when they bought Mobeewave for $100MM in 2020. Based on the technology acquired in this purchase, Apple has recently added contactless card acceptance capability by implementing their Proximity Reader framework to iOS 15.4, for what Apple calls Tap to Pay.

Brazilians wow the world of Open Banking

flag of brazil

At last week’s FDX Virtual Spring Global Summit, I received a glimpse into the huge strides being made by the Financial Data Exchange in the adoption of their data sharing API for the US market. In the context of minimal centralised regulation in the US, progress is driven by industry. This marks a substantial move away from screen scraping, which has historically been prominent in the US market. While the API approach provides value in terms of security and standardisation, many organisations still depend on screen scraping to support their business model.

PIN: we need to talk about our relationship

person holding black and gray digital device

16 years on from PIN day (Valentines Day 2006) how is our relationship with PIN holding up?

Last year Dave Birch postulated that PIN was in decline and indeed no longer necessary as our mobile phones make use of various biometrics to authenticate us and our transactions, but as we often remind ourselves in Chyp, we’re not normal.  UK Finance statistics tells us that whilst the use of Apple Pay & Google Pay at the Point of Sale is on the rise, the humble plastic card is still the preferred way to pay.

Defending secure applications against Jedi mind tricks

man people woman connection

Here at Consult Hyperion, we are often involved in design implementation and testing of secure systems on devices such as smart cards and mobile phones for payments, banking and other applications where security is critical.

Point of Sale cyberattacks – is certification enough?

a person making a payment using a smartwatch

The biggest news in payments security in the last month concerns allegations that point of sale terminals supplied by PAX Technology have been subverted to have the capability of launching cyberattacks. Details of the allegations can be found at Krebs and Bloomberg; in response, PAX Technology has published a rebuttal.

Payments are hard. That’s why the world’s leading payment organisations come to us.

Big Tech, Financial Data … and resilience for critical infrastructure

black android smartphone showing instagram and gmail application

Victoria Saporta, BoE executive director for prudential supervision, has said recently that minimum resilience requirements should be required for the tech giants’ (and others’) hosting services, before they may process and store banking data. We strongly support these comments. We have identified this issue as one of a number of new risks arising from modern financial systems architecture, in recent Structured Risk Analyses that we have carried out for financial and retail organisations in North America, Asia-Pac and EMEA.

Subscribe to our newsletter

You have successfully subscribed to the newsletter

There was an error while trying to send your request. Please try again.

By accepting the Terms, you consent to Consult Hyperion communicating with you regarding our events, reports and services through our regular newsletter. You can unsubscribe anytime through our newsletters or by emailing us.