Money20/20 puts Agentic AI and embedded finance at banking’s core

By Puja Sharma

Money20/20 has once again underscored the rapid evolution of financial services, with industry leaders pointing to agentic AI, embedded finance, composable banking, and modern cross-border infrastructure as the technologies set to define the next phase of banking and payments innovation.

Rather than focusing solely on digitisation, this year’s conversations highlight how financial institutions are rethinking the foundations of banking. From autonomous AI systems and embedded SME lending to modular banking architectures and unified payment infrastructure, the emphasis is increasingly on building scalable, intelligent ecosystems capable of supporting real-time commerce and global expansion.

One of the strongest themes emerging from the event is the rise of agentic AI. Unlike conventional generative AI, which primarily assists employees by generating content or summarising information, agentic AI is designed to make decisions, execute workflows and automate complex financial processes with minimal human intervention. As financial institutions look to improve efficiency while managing growing regulatory expectations, governance and explainability remain central to enterprise adoption.

Dave Ruda, VP of Software Products at Billtrust, said, “In 2026, legacy finance departments are fighting a losing battle. Traditional RPA and static risk modeling are completely powerless against the crushing weight of payment delays and rising operational costs. The market has grown tired of basic generative AI that does nothing more than summarise data. We are now officially in the agentic age.

This shift is about replacing passive software with specialised, autonomous multi-agent ecosystems capable of independent reasoning. We are talking about systems that execute complex financial logic like real-time credit adjustments and precise late-payment prevention, without a single manual bottleneck.

However, as AI moves from back-office advisor to front-office actor, navigating governance becomes your ultimate test. True innovation demands transparent, explainable AI workflows that surface the exact data points behind every decision, ensuring human oversight remains a legally compliant, meaningful safeguard rather than a tick-box exercise.

For the modern CFO, this evolution demands that you stop managing repetitive processes and start acting as the strategic governor of an autonomous ecosystem. By embracing this new era where AI acts rather than asks, finance leaders can finally transition from defensive process overseers into architects of a highly automated, resilient, and self-correcting financial ecosystem.”

Alongside AI, embedded finance continues to reshape access to capital for small and medium-sized businesses. Industry participants argue that lending is increasingly becoming an integrated service embedded directly within digital platforms rather than a standalone banking product. By leveraging real-time transaction data and open banking insights, FinTech platforms are streamlining underwriting while improving access to working capital.

Luke Trayfoot, Head of Partnerships at YouLend, commented, “The FinTech revolution promised to democratise finance, yet a multi-billion-dollar funding gap persists for European SMEs. While the last decade focused extensively on the unbundling of banking services into standalone applications, the financial industry is now pivoting toward a more integrated era: The Great Rebundling. The future of SME liquidity no longer sits in standalone credit applications. Instead, underwriting is being embedded directly into the platforms where merchants already operate every day.

Traditional credit infrastructure remains structurally flawed for digital-first businesses. Rigid, legacy institutions frequently depend on manual onboarding processes and backward-looking credit scores, resulting in widespread friction and high rejection rates. In contrast, rebundling merchant capital into core marketplaces and payment networks such as Shopify and Stripe transforms business financing into an invisible, revenue-based utility. Today’s merchants expect access to financing with the same speed and simplicity as activating a new software feature.

The broader market implications of this embedded approach are fundamentally reshaping commerce. By evaluating live transactional and open banking metrics rather than stagnant financial histories, modern platforms are achieving consistent 80-90% approval rates for applicants across Europe. More importantly, this frictionless access to capital delivers real economic impact, yielding an average 26% increase in sales for funded businesses within just six months.

Ultimately, the next generation of financial products will succeed not by demanding more attention from merchants, but by disappearing into the workflows they already use to run their businesses.”

Another recurring discussion centres on how banks can differentiate in an increasingly commoditised digital banking market. As institutions move beyond feature parity, technology leaders argue that future innovation depends less on replacing core banking systems and more on decoupling customer-facing experiences from legacy infrastructure. This approach allows banks to introduce new capabilities, including AI, without waiting for lengthy transformation programmes to conclude.

Ben Goldin, Chief Executive Officer at Plumery, said, “Across digital banking, many customer experiences are starting to blur into one another, a direct consequence of years spent chasing feature parity rather than meaningful differentiation. Banks aren’t short on ideas, but in an era where every banking app looks and feels identical, they need to reclaim control of what they build and how they build it.

When every bank is tied to the same release cycles, the same integration patterns, the same limits on what can be changed safely, it’s no surprise the outcomes begin to feel identical. It’s a theme we expect to hear loudly at Money20/20 this year as the industry shifts into a new era: The Great Rebundling. Banks can’t build experiences that truly differentiate until they decouple the customer layer from the systems holding them back.

For years, banks have been told to wait for large transformation programmes to finish before they can change anything meaningful. But those programmes often leave institutions with tightly coupled systems, fragmented data, and a delivery pace that simply can’t keep up with customer expectations, which can impact trust. Even when the strategy is very clear, the underlying architecture can slow everything down.

The answer to this isn’t another ‘rip and replace’. It begins with loosening the grip of the systems that have been holding banks back. By decoupling the customer experience from downstream systems, teams can finally move at their own speed, shipping independently of the core, adopt modern engineering practices, and introducing new capabilities, including AI driven ones, when it actually makes sense for them. Modernisation becomes a matter of weeks rather than years, and AI can be adopted when it genuinely adds value. Banks know what they want to build. Real change will happen when the systems beneath them finally give them room to move.”

Cross-border payments and financial infrastructure also remain high on the industry agenda as merchants increasingly operate across multiple jurisdictions. As digital assets, stablecoins and real-time settlement gain traction, financial institutions are exploring infrastructure capable of supporting both traditional fiat payments and digital asset ecosystems.

Emma Campbell, Chief Banking Officer at ONE.io, said, “Across global commerce, we’re seeing a clear shift toward infrastructure led banking models as digital first merchants expand across multiple jurisdictions from day one. These platforms need accounts, verification, and settlement layers that scale with them at their pace.

Yet this is exactly where traditional correspondent banking is becoming mismatched with digital first sectors through delays, fragmented onboarding and even settlement windows that don’t reflect the always on nature of modern banking. It’s a prominent challenge as conversations shift toward mass stablecoin adoption, where rails, data identity and trust are converging in ways traditional correspondent models can’t keep up with.

The practical reality is that scaling cross border operations requires consistent KYC standards, multi currency liquidity management, and the ability to settle funds instantly without relying on long intermediary chains. In sectors like iGaming, MSBs, and Web3, where we see high velocity, high value flows every day, certainty of settlement is as important as speed. A single delay can freeze revenue across multiple markets, which is why businesses look for partners with infrastructure that delivers resilience and certainty.

We’re seeing strong demand for unified financial infrastructure where fiat and digital assets coexist on the same platform. As digital assets become more embedded in treasury and settlement workflows, firms with resilient, diversified connectivity across both fiat and digital rails will be better positioned than those tied to a single network or legacy system.”

Taken together, the perspectives reflect a common industry direction. Financial institutions are moving beyond standalone digital initiatives towards intelligent, integrated and infrastructure-led operating models. Whether through autonomous AI, embedded financial services, composable banking or modern payment rails, the next phase of innovation is increasingly focused on enabling institutions to operate faster, scale more efficiently and deliver differentiated customer experiences in an increasingly competitive financial services landscape.