Money20/20 USA 2026: Stablecoins and ID verification dominate opening day

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Money20/20 USA 2026 is officially underway in Las Vegas, bringing together fintech leaders from across the globe for a show packed with insights into the latest financial innovations.

On opening Monday, the conference hit the ground running with a stacked agenda of panels, podcasts, presentations, and fireside chats on topics ranging from borderless financial architecture to AI and autonomous agents.

Here, we run through some of the day's top discussions, which focused on stablecoin adoption, key insights from emerging markets, and the vital role of robust identification in the era of AI.

Stablecoins in the spotlight

With stablecoins moving rapidly toward the financial mainstream, the Stablecoins, Security and Trust: Protecting the Future of Money Movement panel examined the core opportunities and challenges of digital asset payments.

The panel agreed that the narrative surrounding stablecoins has shifted from how a company plugs into stablecoin infrastructure to what can actually be built on top of it.

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"The conversation has changed from how do I get access to the rails... into [how] I'm building a payments services business," said Alex Garn, chief product officer of Borderless.

Keith Vander Leest, BVNK's general manager for the US, echoed this shift, noting that stablecoins have moved past their original user base. "For too long, I feel like stablecoins have been used by crypto traders... there's a huge opportunity to grow into the traditional payment system," he said, adding that BVNK's role is to "enable fintechs and, more broadly now, banks and FIs and all sorts of companies to take advantage of this new payment rail on chain".

Mastercard's Ann Johnson, who moderated the session, added to this point, noting that stablecoins account for almost 30% of cryptocurrency transaction volumes. "When you're at 30%, you've gone from experimentation to real world," she highlighted.

However, the primary hurdle facing widespread adoption remains trust. "Money will always be a trust-based business," stated Garn.

Rajpal Khangura, co-founder and chief compliance officer of Keyrails, framed the trust gap by comparing how clients perceive stablecoins versus legacy rails. "No client has ever come to me and said, 'How does a domestic wire work?'" he noted. "But I still keep getting the question of how does the stablecoin work - we need to get to a point where it's just another rail, and it's trusted."

Until that happens, he argued, the job of infrastructure providers is partly reassurance: "Don't worry about anything else behind, but it's secure, and it will get there."

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"The typical user doesn't care whether it's sent via ACH, RTP, or Faster Payments in the UK — they just want to know that it's going to get to where it needs to get safely," stressed Vander Leest.

According to the panel, addressing fraud and risk within the industry requires a coordinated, systemic framework. Garn said: "It's not just, oh, one bank, one account, it's your problem. No, it's a solution that we need to apply to an entire system."

On the practical challenge of navigating today's fragmented compliance tooling landscape, Khangura noted: "There are so many systems, there are so many vendors now for KYC, KYB, KYT that you can get lost in. So to try and have one turnkey solution with one integration for the whole piece from beginning to end absolutely works."

Ultimately, the panellists agreed that true success for stablecoins means disappearing into the background. "Make it invisible... make payments as easy as it is to do a mobile payment on your phone today," Garn concluded.

Lessons from emerging markets

In a later session, David Nandwa, founder, CEO and CTO of Honeycoin; Maria Oldham, COO at Yellow Card Financial; Ella Zhang, managing partner and head of YZI Labs; and Kevin Lehtiniitty, CEO and founder of Borderless, took to the Meridian Stage to showcase real-world stablecoin use cases from emerging markets across Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

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Nandwa explained that in Africa, stablecoins are solving for two critical issues: "Stablecoins number one solved for the trust layer when it comes to counterparty settlements and cross-border payments... The second problem... is once you've solved for trust, the second thing you solve for is cost and price discovery."

He highlighted that the two primary use cases for the technology in Africa are international trade and remittances from workers sending money home to their families.

Describing a recent programme supporting 30 start-ups, Zhang noted: "Over half of them are focused on payments, stablecoin payments in emerging markets like Latin America, Africa, Asia."

She shared that these companies are tackling three major friction points. "One is foreign exchanges, the efficiency, transparency, and cost efficiency to solve foreign exchanges. Second is that there are still a lot of off-ramp frictions plugged into the existing card system [to] acquire users... The third... is diaspora. The people who live overseas will have to pay the older generation's bills and send the money."

Outlining four distinct use cases - two consumer and two business - that exist in "every market, regardless of where it's located", Lehtiniitty spoke about treasury management flows, B2B payments, personal remittances, and payroll payouts.

On the consumer-centric example of payroll, Lehtiniitty explained: "These may not be technically like W-2 salary payouts, but these are things like gig economy marketplaces... contractor payments, where stablecoins are getting used as a much more efficient remittance mechanism".

He predicted that the next big adopters of the technology will be global giants like Uber and Airbnb, alongside "others that have massive global payouts, low ticket size… that's incredibly inefficient to send via traditional correspondent banking".

Oldham explained that while the early adopters of stablecoin technology were PSPs, remittance firms, and crypto-native companies, the current trend sees large corporations operating across multiple territories looking to adopt the technology. These enterprises are aiming to "solve traditional pain points that they have with treasury management and access to currencies, primarily like emerging market currencies", she said.

On the process of integration for institutional adoption, she added: "You cannot come to a large, very established corporate and say, 'I have this amazing solution, but you're going to have to change'. We have to be part of their regular workflow... You need to have the visibility, the transparency around the costs, the fees, the time, and the confirmation of the settlement."

Offering further insights from her work with emerging market start-ups, Zhang highlighted that while technology allows stablecoins to move globally with ease, building trust and reliable flows depends heavily on successfully integrating them with local financial infrastructure.

Finally, Nandwa stressed the importance of working with regulators to facilitate continued adoption. "I never thought I'd be on a panel saying that I engage with politicians because I'm building a stablecoin company. But one of the reasons I realised it's so important is if we're focused on building the products and these use cases, but we don't focus on building the policy that actually allows us to continue to build, you'll find the policy drafted by people who have certain incentives, and those incentives typically will be selfish towards the world that exists today, and not the world that we're working so hard to build."

On the convergence of TradFi and DeFi, Nandwa concluded: "It's really encouraging to see the banks here because I think they've now woken up to the fact that we're not trying to kill them. We actually need them, and we need to work with them to actually grow this ecosystem for the benefit of everyone."

ID in the age of AI

After years spent mastering KYC compliance, financial institutions are now facing an entirely new frontier: customers who are AI bots. In a panel titled Know Your Agent: Here's How Banks Are Updating Identity Verification, experts from Firmly, Skyfire, Payos, and VGS delved into the identity frameworks being built to verify the AI agents transacting on behalf of real people.

Chuck Yu, CEO of VGS, stated that while the financial services industry began reacting to the "agentic presence" around 18 months ago, it is only in the last couple of months that banks have fully awoken to the challenge. Amir Sarhangi, CEO and founder of Skyfire, added that institutions are still "trying to figure out what their strategy should be".

Sarhangi illustrated that when discussing fraud, the primary concern revolves around AI agents impersonating humans. "Up to now, everything has been probabilistic from the web security point of view. How can we best see patterns around fraud and then be able to shut those down? They're not deterministic, and in this world where you have now 60% of the internet traffic being [agentic/bot], and that number is exponentially growing, you need a much more deterministic way to know this is really a legitimate agent."

He added: "When we talk to banks, and we talk to merchants in particular, their fraud signals are totally thrown off now because an agent has an IP address from three different locations. That's the biggest fraud signal you can see from someone that's trying to come to your website, but that could be a real agent that's trying to purchase something on your website. So you need new fraud signals through the existing web security stack. That's critical in terms of being able to scale in the space."

Kumar Senthil, CEO and founder of Firmly, noted that today's internet infrastructure presents a fundamental barrier: he said websites are "built for consumers who are directly browsing", adding: It's not built for agents today. That's a basic infrastructure that doesn't exist, and the agents are going viral today."

Turning to the question of consumer and business protection, Yu explained: "What the networks and the banks are realising is in a universe where you do the proper validations, they need to step in and at least protect the merchants from concentrated bad actors... If you do the proper KYC, if you identify the agent in a very specific type of way, if you get the proper spend information - this agent is allowed to buy for me in this category up to this dollar amount - then perhaps you can see a liability shift in the future, where the issuers and the networks take on a bit more responsibility, alleviating probably the worst prepared player in the ecosystem, the merchant, from absorbing all of that."

Senthil agreed, adding that an enforcement layer is required to prevent agents from making unauthorised purchases, alongside "cryptographic evidence of them approving it, and for that amount, for that merchant, therefore the purchase went through".

Jonathan McGowan, co-founder and CEO of Payos, concurred, stating: "Intent is the oil related to commerce. What the user or business wants to do is incredibly important, and making sure that the intent actually can get surfaced along the way of that transaction through the different parties that it flows through."

For Yu, the most important thing this agentic payment ecosystem must address in the near term is the initial "handshake" - the moment a user hands their card credentials to an AI agent for the first time. He stressed that there must be absolute "confidence for every subsequent actor that this is in fact a good actor - this is an end user who has proper intent, is not a bot, is not a foreign entity".

The future of identity processes

Sticking on the theme of identity verification, FinTech Futures sat down with John Gordon, CEO of ValidiFi, to discuss the evolving landscape of real-time payments, the impact of AI on fraud prevention, and where the industry currently stands.

On the long-running tension between fraud protection procedures and customer experience, Gordon cited a striking statistic on friction tolerance: 68% of consumers say they'll abandon a process if they encounter friction, with 75% of those falling in the 25-34 age demographic – a "pretty coveted age bracket", stated Gordon.

However, he argued the trade-off should not be viewed as a binary choice, but rather an exercise in precision. "You have to inject friction where the risk profile of the applicant warrants it," he said, which in turn "creates an opportunity for express approvals for consumers who have no risk flags associated with their account".

When asked whether identity verification has kept pace with the rollout of faster payments, Gordon did not hedge: "I believe it's a step behind."

The root of the problem, he explained, is that legacy systems assess one siloed data point at a time, failing to see that fraud exposes itself in the connections between those data points. "It matters how many different email addresses you've utilised," Gordon stressed. "If I can tie a consumer to four different email addresses in the ValidiFi network, their risk profile goes up by 70%."

The lesson is that verification has to look "more broadly at the connected data around it for changes, frequent changes, velocity metrics that tell us how often a consumer is utilising different contact tempo", added Gordon.

What's next at Money20/20 USA?

Stay tuned to our coverage tomorrow as we dive deep into this week's major announcements with exclusive insights straight from the innovating teams. Don't miss a beat – stay updated through our dedicated Money20/20 USA Content Hub.

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