Three themes kept surfacing across every conversation at Money 20/20 — partnerships over licensing, B2B2C durability, and the search for tokenization's first real use case. The through-line: fintech is finally asking more precise questions. After years of "we can do everything" pitches and API-first everything, the conversations this year were grounded in a different kind of honesty.
These are the four shifts every payments and fintech leader needs to sit with.
1. The fastest path to global scale isn't building everything yourself.
There's a persistent myth in fintech: that to be credible, you need to hold the license, own the rails, and control every layer of the stack. The appeal is understandable, but after years of watching companies try, this ends up being one of the most expensive challenges in this industry.
The reality confirmed across multiple conversations at Money 20/20: The bottleneck isn't product, but the time it takes to establish Layer 1 banking relationships. Local licensing requirements, capital constraints and jurisdictional complexity don't compress no matter how good your engineering team is. For most businesses trying to scale globally, the winning move isn't to spend three years on a regulatory treadmill in 5 countries simultaneously. It's to architect the right partnerships for your user base so the team stays focused on the actual value layer.
The most successful fintechs at the event aren't trying to be banks. They're mastering orchestration. Speed-to-market is a function of partner selection, not internal licensing. The regulatory infrastructure already exists. The question is whether you're smart enough to use it.
2. Your partners won't outgrow you — if you're doing your job right.
A question that came up often, and was echoed in several sessions: "Won't your B2B partners eventually cut you out and go direct to the banks?"
While this may seem to be a potential outcome, it misunderstands what deep banking infrastructure actually requires. Direct banking relationships are more than just contracts. They're years of operational depth, capital commitment, regulatory standing, and relationship management that most fintechs have no interest in building — nor should they. The cost of that optionality is enormous, and the ROI rarely pencils out versus leaning into a partner who already has it.
What plays out in practice: as partners grow, they don't graduate away from infrastructure providers — they optimise toward the ones who remove the most friction. The best infrastructure partners aren't the hurdle you eventually jump over. They're the efficiency layer that becomes more valuable the larger you get. That's the model we're building toward at UR — not a dependency, but a compounding advantage.
The B2B2C moat is real, and it's durable. The key is making sure you're always the highest-ROI option in your partner's stack.
3. Tokenized deposits are real and need an anchor.
JPMorgan's Kinexys took center stage at this year's event. Not because of what it does today, but because of what it signals about where institutional thinking has landed.
Even JPMorgan — arguably the most capable financial institution on the planet — has concluded that tokenized deposits don't create value in the abstract. They need an anchor use case: a specific, high-frequency, regulated workflow where moving value on-chain solves a friction point that existing rails cannot.
This is the shift worth paying attention to. The industry is past "can we do this?" The question is now "where does this actually matter first?" — and this is a question that reinforces precision over hype.
The companies that will define the next chapter of finance aren't building the most sophisticated tokenization infrastructure. They're identifying the first real-world use cases where tokenized deposits or stablecoins change the unit economics of liquidity and build the bridge from today's regulated counterparties to that world.
At UR, proof of utility is where our energy is focused.
4. In a saturated market, depth beats breadth.
The clearest takeaway from Money 20/20 was that everyone is selling modularity, single APIs, and "plug-and-play infrastructure." However, diving deeper into that, we need to understand that an API doesn't give you direct SIC clearing access. A modular architecture doesn't come with a FINMA banking license. These things take years to build and can't be replicated by writing a wrapper around someone else's endpoint.
The market is crowded precisely because surface-level features are easy to copy. What's hard to copy is regulatory depth — the genuine Layer 1-adjacent positioning that lets partners tap into institutional rails without building them from scratch.
That's where UR has a structural advantage worth being direct about. We're not trying to be everything for everyone. We're going deep on the specific capabilities, including SIC clearing, FINMA licensing, stablecoin orchestration, and more, that create access barriers too high for most competitors to match. And we're making those capabilities accessible to the partners who need them most.
In a crowded market, specific moats compound. Breadth of features doesn't.
Where this leaves us
Money 20/20 was a reminder that the payments industry is entering a period of consolidation of ideas. The playbooks that worked in the early days of fintech (move fast, build everything, figure out compliance later) are giving way to something more rigorous: durable partnerships, regulated infrastructure, and genuine use cases for new technology.
At UR, we're building for that world. The conversations we've had in Amsterdam only reinforced that we're building the right things.
