Not the New Kid Anymore: A Recap of Money20/20 USA

I’m going to be honest: flying into Las Vegas for a massive fintech event like Money20/20 can be daunting. There are several tracks of relevant industry content for tens of thousands of attendees who pack into the convention center at the Venetian for half a week. It's so much information in so little time.

For many of us, the painted clouds on the hotel’s ceiling were the closest thing to outside we got for four days. Still, Money20/20 is one of our marquee events of the season, and we had 20 Modernos “on the ground” to man our booth, meet with customers and prospects, and speak on four panels.

Between this year and last, a few things have shifted. One of the most interesting things for me—and something that was noted by others, as well—was that we did not have to explain what Modern Treasury does very often. Almost everyone we talked to had heard of us, knew a customer or partner or contact of ours, or had been following our content for a bit.

It was pretty incredible to talk to people who (more or less) understood what we’re trying to accomplish in modernizing payment operations, and who were coming to us for solutions. For the first time, our reputation had preceded us. We weren't the new kid on the block anymore. And we wanted nothing more than to meet the high expectations that our brand had set.

Sunday

The first opportunity to meet those expectations came on Sunday with our platform demo. While many companies were there to showcase their products, part of our demo was live (as opposed to just slides) which made it a little trickier for stage production. This meant our Head of Design, Duncan Graham, had to toggle between our presentation and the live product environment.

Part of the reason this was so important to us is that we wanted to show how we leverage proprietary AI in our recon engine—a component of our product we launched at Money 20/20—and to do so in a way that makes it “real,” with actual data. Duncan re-recorded his demo for folks who missed it live, and you can view it below.

Monday

The first day of the conference, we met the team down at our booth on the show floor to get ready for a day of meetings, both planned and impromptu.

We were also on two different panels. First, Nick Farrow, our Head of Bank Partnerships, talked with folks from Evolve, Alloy, and Klaros Group about compliance—how it can be a competitive advantage, help control for multiple points across the payments chain, and build and keep customer trust.

In our second panel, Product Manager, Ani Narayan, talked to The Clearing House and Q2 about emerging payments and new payment experiences. The cloud offers new opportunities to move money, new tools for builders, and new innovation for banks to lean into. As the US catches up with the rest of the world with faster payments, Ani said,  the “need for software is paramount.”

Compliance is a program; it’s not a one time thing. And the best companies are the ones who stitch actionable data & insights together so clients can ensure their platforms aren’t co-opted by bad actors.

Nick Farrow, Head of Bank Partnerships

As companies are adopting and modernizing with 24/7 rails, the need for software is paramount. Companies need to be able to automate and orchestrate everything around a payment without linearly scaling their teams.

Ani Narayan, Product Manager

Tuesday

Day two followed much the same pattern: more meetings both at the booth and “off campus,” many more in-booth platform demos, and two more panels.

Our first panel of the day, our co-founder and CEO, Dimitri Dadiomov, and Stych co-founder and CTO, Julianna Lamb, chatted with Chetan Puttagunta, GP at Benchmark, about building companies that are “developer-first”—companies whose tools tried to solve the ubiquitous problems they met while at other companies.

One key takeaway is that it’s less about innovating for the broad landscape, and more about looking closely at how innovation can solve specific use cases from customers. As Dimitri said, “Start with what your customer needs, so you’ll know what success looks like and you can work backwards, versus trying to shoehorn whatever new technology into a product.”

In payment ops, you need 100% certainty. We want to give companies the efficiency of AI where it can be helpful, but from a product perspective, we have to put guardrails around it. And that’s what we did with recon suggestions.

Dimitri Dadiomov, CEO

In our second panel of the day, our Head of Enterprise Sales, Molly Fischer, talked to Glenbrook Partners, with BetMGM, FanDuel, and Checkout, about the future of payments in online gaming. The goal is to make the payment itself invisible to the user, while delivering real-time payment data visibility to the companies and money managers. This becomes especially important as we move into a world of real-time payments, and irreversible pay-ins and payouts can happen 24/7/365.

Every opportunity to surface data in the payment lifecycle is an opportunity for a great customer experience.

Molly Fischer, Head of Enterprise Sales

Wednesday

Some final thoughts for the final day: I’d like to think that across the hundreds of conversations we had over these four days, we left a good impression and preserved the good reputation that we’ve set for ourselves. For me, these days were not just a testament to our brand, but our people.

My hometown basketball team, the Golden State Warriors, have a slogan: “Strength in numbers.” Over the years, this slogan has become part of their culture and general ethos—more than just a deep bench, it signifies inclusion, trust, and teamwork in service of a greater goal.

To me, this year’s Money20/20 was a showcase of our own strength in numbers. Between the marketing folks who ran the show and set our positioning, to the sales and product folks who were ready to demo, to customer success and bank partnership folks relationship building, to those on our leadership team on panels bringing our expertise to the broader conference, everyone showed up for MT.

Usually, there’s a post-conference come-down, but I am actually energized, and I think a lot of the team feels the same. We want more of those conversations. So, if you want your own demo, or want to chat about how to modernize your payment operations for the new era of payments, reach out to us.