According to Forbes, Money 2020 revealed a significant shift from last year’s buzzwords like embedded finance and BNPL toward three emerging trends. Anthropic announced Excel plugins with financial skills while OpenAI integrated into commercial apps, with Anthropic’s Mike Krieger emphasizing building at the edge of model capabilities. Sean Neville’s Catena Labs is developing a financial operating system for AI agents, including “Know Your Agent” protocols. Industry experts predict agentic commerce will be mainstream within twelve months, while stablecoins face consolidation among dozens of issuers as the U.S. and China race to define the next settlement standard.
AI as both builder and customer
Here’s the thing that really struck me about this year’s conversations. We’re not just talking about AI making existing financial products smarter anymore. We’re talking about AI becoming the actual customer. When Sean Neville, who co-founded Circle, says his new customers will be AI agents that need to pay, borrow, and lend, that’s a fundamental rethink of what fintech even means.
And Mike Krieger’s perspective is equally fascinating. He went from thinking chat interfaces were too primitive to seeing them as genius because everything underneath the chat box is what’s changing. Basically, we’re moving from AI as a feature to AI as the platform itself. When companies like Parcha and Decagon are tearing out custom code to rebuild directly on Claude’s agent SDKs, you know something big is happening.
The stablecoin consolidation wave
Now, let’s talk about the money itself. Stablecoins have quietly become the plumbing for everything from payroll to cross-border payments. But as Jake Gibson from Better Tomorrow Ventures noted, there are dozens of issuers being funded right now, and payment rails always consolidate. That’s just how infrastructure works.
What’s really interesting is Neville’s point about interoperability. Nobody wants 50 different stablecoins – they want dollars on their phone. His prediction of a payments-optimized blockchain becoming the TCP/IP of money makes perfect sense. But here’s the kicker: this isn’t just a technical challenge. It’s becoming a geopolitical race between U.S. private stablecoins and Chinese CBDCs. The next generation of money will be built through private innovation and public policy, just like the internet itself.
Compliance meets code
The third trend might sound boring, but it’s actually huge. We’re seeing the merger of compliance and code, where AI lets fintechs sell banks “Systems of Action” without replacing their legacy “Systems of Record.” That means they can finally tap into much larger budgets – Vivek Krishnamurthy estimates it’s 10x the market they’ve been selling into.
Think about that for a second. Fintech has been trying to work around or replace banking infrastructure for years. Now, AI might finally provide the bridge that lets new technology coexist with legacy systems. And as Jeff Green from Hatch Bank pointed out, we might see more direct linkages between regulated institutions and capital providers, cutting out some of the middlemen.
What this means for the next 15 years
Vivek framed it perfectly: the first 15 years of fintech were about digital distribution of existing solutions. The next 15 will fundamentally improve the core value proposition. We’re not just making banking faster or cheaper – we’re reimagining what financial products can be when AI is both the builder and the customer.
Jay Ganatra’s observation that “stablecoins were a solution in search of a problem – AI may be that problem” feels particularly insightful. These trends are converging in ways that will create entirely new product categories. And for entrepreneurs and investors focused on this space, like those at Fluent Ventures, the opportunities are just beginning to emerge. The fintech revolution? It’s actually just getting started.
