Money 20/20 Recap 2024

Money20/20 is always one of the busiest events for us. Not only is it a great opportunity for us to network with existing partners and clients, it’s also a great way to meet new people who stop by our booth. The three days in Amsterdam thus allowed our team to catch up with our fintech industry peers and keep our ears to the ground. One thing that stood out to me from conversations with other attendees is how our agnostic approach to payment orchestration sets the standards in this niche.

Payment orchestration is more than just a hot trend. The feedback we received during our meetings was that enterprise businesses clearly recognize that they can no longer delay implementing a solution like IXOPAY. But the market for orchestration services appears oversaturated, with so many different companies labeling themselves as an “orchestrator”. In reality, orchestration is not as simple as distilling the solution down to one standard set of services - in particular, we believe that our agnostic approach puts us in a unique position to address the needs of merchants without the conflicts of interest that apply to those vendors whose core business is that of payments processing. We were happy to discover that the majority of the new leads we met were already familiar with IXOPAY, with a significant number having been recommended by an existing client. That suggests that we must be doing something right!

Following the announcement of the merger between IXOPAY and TokenEx, this was the first event attended by both teams. It felt great to be together, and our combined offerings put us in a better and stronger position to cater to the global businesses we serve.

Money 20/20 always draws the big players in the industry, meaning that I spent almost all of my time meeting with providers and partners. These face-to-face meetings are extremely important to strengthening the partnerships between IXOPAY and payment providers. 

The merger between TokenEx and IXOPAY was of course a hot topic. I’d been expecting a lot of emails on this subject shortly after the announcement was made, but it seems like our partners were waiting for Money 20/20 to take the opportunity to talk about it in person. They were primarily interested in the reasons behind the merger from IXOPAY’s perspective and what this means for the future. 

Payment orchestration was high on the agenda too. I noticed a definite mood swing in this regard. Payment providers are beginning to realize the value of payment orchestration to their business model, rather than seeing payment orchestrators as a rival. For a payment provider, being integrated in a platform like IXOPAY offers real benefits - merchants can more easily switch to their services, either to replace an existing PSP, as a backup provider or in order to add new payment options to their checkout. This quicker time-to-market for merchants is a real advantage for providers that are already integrated, making them much more appealing to merchants already using payment orchestration. This presents payment providers with exciting sales opportunities.

Furthermore, the payment providers benefit from IXOPAY’s expertise. Just like merchants benefit from payment orchestration by having a single system to manage all their payment processes, PSPs benefit from having a single party handling the integration once. Dealing with experts with many decades of experience is a much smoother process for the providers than working directly with merchants. And once the solution is integrated in IXOPAY, it’s integrated for every merchant using the platform. That reduces demands on the PSP’s resources and the need to repeatedly answer similar questions for each individual merchant.

I was also excited to meet our new CEO, Brady Harris, in person. Brady got to experience first hand just how well-known IXOPAY is in Europe, with so many big players coming to our booth to talk to us. It felt like a very positive introduction to IXOPAY. I feel confident that we have the right person at the helm to guide us through this next exciting chapter in IXOPAY’s story.

My role at Money 20/20 was to engage with visitors to the booth and to answer general questions about IXOPAY - who we are, what we do and whether our offerings can help them solve particular issues they are facing. A large number of the visitors already knew about IXOPAY and understood the general premise of our offerings. This is not that surprising, given that most attendees are themselves payment providers, fintechs and ISOs - primarily white label prospects or potential partners, rather than merchants. These are companies that we generally already have working relationships with or where we are already on each other’s radar.

With the booth being so busy - our placement right next to the food court meant there was a high volume of traffic -  and given my role as the first point of contact for many of the visitors, I was unable to leave the booth for long. I did take the time to soak in the atmosphere, visit the other booths and bag my fair share of the swag on offer. Speaking of swag, the Pez dispensers we took along proved to be a great icebreaker, and we were out of stock by the second day!

I was able to use any downtime between visitors to get to know our new US colleagues. I got on very well with Amanda (SVP Sales) and our new CEO, Brady Harris, speaks Russian quite well. He was eager to talk to me in my native language, as well as telling me stories from his visits to post-perestroika Russia. First impressions were great, and left me feeling positive about the future of IXOPAY post-merger.