Yet another Money20/20 Recap from a Newbie

After taking a week to breathe (and take care of some other business), we’re back here at Fintech Compliance Chronicles and as promised, I thought to recap my experience at the conference (this was my first time attending) from a regulatory compliance lens.

First off, let’s get the fluffy stuff out of the way -

• FOOD. It was great to be fed throughout the 4 days and not have to worry about breakfast, lunch (or dinner), for the most part. Menus included Indian, Thai, other cuisines, and on top of it the various happy hours/lunches/dinners were hosted at some great restaurants in the Venetian.
• VENUE. It was a bit of work to get around the building; with the dedicated conference area rarely being where I’d have a lot of my individual meetups or happy hours/lunches/dinners. I think in future years, we could do with a map in the conference app that also includes how to get around the Palazzo (mall) area since a lot was happening there as well.
• FRIENDS. After deciding during COVID to start connecting with folks in the industry and creating some great relationships over the last three years, including through Clubhouse, Twitter, and elsewhere, it was incredible to finally get to chat with many folks in person who I had only known online. A lot of the folks in this space have been incredibly generous with their time and mentorship to me on a personal basis, and it was great to at least get to shake their hands.
• EXTRAS. As I had the opportunity to attend the conference as press this year (representing this newsletter!), I have to say it was great to have the opportunity to use the press lounge to chill or have conversations in a quiet place (when needed) - and of course, more food. Always welcome. Also really appreciated the prayer room which came in quite handy for me.

And now, what most of you all are here for, the content. I will lead with the fact that if you came to the conference, you had the option to curate your conference in whatever way you saw fit. There were so many opportunities to learn, meet, and deal. You could do a mix of all these activities or focus on just one kind of experience. After initially focusing on the sessions, in day 2 I quickly realized the value in just going with the flow and found it to be a much more enjoyable experience. Let’s dive into the details:

Sessions

Full disclosure - most of my session viewing was contained to Sunday. And for good reason - while I learned that many folks decided to skip this first day (and indeed, the venue wasn’t fully set up yet), I was delighted to join in the “Washington Explained” series, a full day of sessions talking about all things compliance, regulations, risk, and the like. I previewed some of the talks in our last few issues, but there were a lot of insights, and I’ll highlight some of the biggest ones (keeping in mind that there are likely to be full length videos shared at some point, so this is purely going off notes):

• Sarah Elliott - Senior Advisor, VS Vector - “There has been a lot of discussion about the word tech debt…and perhaps you need to start thinking about your compliance debt or risk management debt…because eventually you’ll have to deal with it at some point. It’s not something that you think about when you first build your product, but it absolutely should be top of mind [even that early on]”
• Sheila Warren - CEO, Crypto Council for Innovation - “Over the past 100 years, we as a society have constructed a global financial system that is fundamentally inequitable. It’s inequitable at the country level, at the community level, and at the individual level…I remain committed and convinced that digital assets sitting on the blockchain are the best opportunity we are going to have in our lifetime to address this. My hope is that [regulatory bodies] around the world support that vision and rally around an idea that competition and innovation are encouraged [even if companies sometimes fail] - otherwise we are going to default back to a system that has failed billions of people around the world.”
• Mary Dent - Senior Advisor, Klaros Group - “There’s a lot of risk assessments and policies and paperwork, but if you think of those things as real based on the outcome - for example, how will I know if my liquidity is really stretched or what if I can’t settle with a card network or if you think about AML, how I know a consumer is who they say they are - looking behind the tendencies to reduce these things to administrative meaningless burdens - if you don’t do that, you can get into a situation where something is broken for a long period of time and you wont’ realize it until it’s too late and you’ve lost millions and millions of dollars, it is not reparable at that point.”
• Audrey Kim - Venture Partner, Oak HC/FT - “One thing I learned the hard way as a product manager was that fraudsters always come first [once you launch a product] and fraudsters are your power users. If you launch a product and see extraordinary growth out of the gate, it’s probably fraud.”
• Meredith Fuchs - General Counsel, Plaid - “In the proposed [open banking rule - CFPB proposed Section 1033 rulemaking] it talks about safeguards for security, data and the ecosystem, and this shouldn’t be a surprise. If you’re paying attention to what’s expected within financial services and you’re in a regulatory role, you should be trying to build those things before a regulator tells you that you need to do it…the good thing about building it before a regulator tells you is that you might be able to influence how the ultimate rule turns out and might be something the regulator might want to put in place.”
• Ashwin Vasan - Associate Director, CFPB - On 1033: “No one wants to micromanage how technology is actually going to work…it’s been 13 years [since Dodd-Frank was enacted] and we’ve learned a lot ourselves in terms of specific technical specifications and are now revisiting this at a much later point in time…the regulatory process is slow, for better or worse.”
• Elad Roisman - Partner, Cravath, Swaine & Moore, LLP - “I think everyone would feel better if there were some sort of government overseer [for crypto] that could say ‘this is good.’ No one creates the most perfect 10-K, but knowing it is there [even if you don’t read it] gives you the knowledge [and comfort] that someone took the time to go through it and that this is a regulated space.”
• Daniel Gorfine - CEO, Gattaca Horizons - “My concern is that if the tone is too negative, especially for community banks - that are trying to stay competitive in this environment - if they sense that the regulators are wary and view new technologies with skepticism, they are not going to adopt those technologies. I fear we’ll lose our competitive edge in terms of striking the right balance with AI and how we regulate it.”

Networking

Starting lightly on Day 2 (Monday) and then exploding on Day 3 (Tuesday), I used a combination of the Money 20/20 app, LinkedIn pre-meeting introductions, and good old fashioned just sitting down at a table with one or two people and introducing myself and going from there, to connect with folks.

I appreciated the organizer’s efforts to use the “Connection Zones,” but one thing I learned quickly was that in my case, saving that for Wednesday, the last day (which I left open as my day to follow up on connections through the app) was a really bad idea - a lot of people ended up going home or realizing that most folks had gone home, and then ended up skipping the meetings at the last minute.

There were tons of folks and interesting companies that I got to speak to, and in fact you’ll be seeing some of those folks show up in these pages in the weeks to come - stay tuned!

Other

I got to attend some great happy hours and “side events” - kudos to Galileo Financial Technologies , Perkins Coie , LoanPro , ComplyAdvantage , SentiLink and Nova Credit for some great food, fantastic venues, and much more relaxed environments in which to connect with people. Shout out to the folks at Black Tap for bringing out some hilariously large ice cream shakes/floats and then thrusting them on some poor unsuspecting soul who would feel guilty and decide to take the risk and finish off a ridiculous amount of sugar.

Closing Thoughts

I enjoyed my first conference, particularly as a press attendee. Decided to throw my hat in the ring for Asia for 2024, and see how the experience lines up - mostly because it’s in one of my favorite places in the world, Thailand - although I’ll be curious to see how it goes given I was just there around the same time and it was heavy monsoon season with nothing but rain - folks attending who are expecting a lot of outdoors time might be a bit disappointed.

On a more serious note, beyond the fact that there was a whole day dedicated to regulatory compliance, the fact that everyone I met, so many stalls I walked past, and so much of the theme of this conference, was that compliance and risk management is suddenly important and not just a thing that can be ignored. As someone who’s worked in this space for over 17 years, I have to say I always thought our world would be a relatively small space, especially as auditors, where we would be the people everyone was scared of. To see the space we play in go “mainstream” at what is essentially a huge sales conference was absolutely astounding and filled me with a lot of pride.

I appreciate all of you who subscribe and have to say that the conference renewed my commitment to putting out the latest and greatest updates and analysis in the fintech compliance space. So thanks again, and we’ll continue onward!

(Side note - sorry for the slightly nutty schedule since the conference - tomorrow we’ll get back on track with the usual Friday Compliance Event Roundup.)