Day one asked who carries the risk when money moves itself. Day two showed the industry building the answer into standards and code, not waiting for regulators.
Day one at Money20/20 USA kept circling one question: when money moves itself, who carries the risk? On Tuesday the question did not go away, but it changed shape. Across the stages and in the news coming off the floor, the industry stopped waiting for someone else to answer it and started building the answer into standards, certificates and code. And the contest between tokenised deposits and stablecoins, still live on Monday, came close to being called off.
From who pays to who vouches
On Monday the liability question was asked about agents: if an AI buys something its owner did not intend, the issuer needs to know which agent it was and what it was allowed to do. On Tuesday the same logic was applied to everyone in the chain. In his keynote conversation with Penny Lee of the Financial Technology Association, The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) Chairman Travis Hill described the standard-setting body the agency has been helping banks and fintechs design since the summer. Instead of every community bank running its own due diligence on the same fintech, independent assessors would check third parties against common standards that small banks can rely on. It would be run by the industry, and “this would be completely voluntary”.
The same idea is spreading to agents. Visa, BILL and Billtrust announced the first live pilot in which an AI agent pays supplier invoices through supplier portals, registered through Visa’s Trusted Agent Protocol and recognised by the supplier’s platform in place of the login and CAPTCHA a person would face. Evervault launched short-lived tokens that let an agent complete a checkout without ever holding card numbers or passwords, pitched as an alternative to the networks’ own agent programmes. Elliptic launched a free certification for the compliance staff who will have to supervise agents, alongside research in which only 16 per cent of 318 senior risk and compliance professionals were very confident their team could govern an AI agent today.
What has not changed is who answers in the end. Asked who carries the liability as identity data passes between firms, Hill said the deeper questions sit outside the FDIC’s remit and described fraud as a whole-of-government effort. On Monday former CFTC Chairman Chris Giancarlo argued for letting innovation run ahead of the rules. On liability, at least, Tuesday showed it already has.
The controls are now the bottleneck
The show’s own theme is speed, and Lee put the obvious follow-up to Hill: if payments are getting faster, so is fraud. He said new AI tools make identity harder at both ends, when an account is opened and every time it is used, and that the FDIC is working with the Treasury on a longer-term approach. The most practical point was about money that should not leave. Rules require banks to release funds quickly, but where fraud is obvious it may be in everyone’s interest for the bank to hold them, and Hill said there have been discussions with the Federal Reserve about those rules.
The rails are speeding up regardless. Nacha reported 470.4 million Same Day ACH payments in the third quarter, up 36.7 per cent on a year earlier, on the same day the show was debating agents that pay around the clock. Monday’s message was that trust has to be built before scale. Tuesday’s was that the controls built for a slower system, from identity checks at account opening to the rules on releasing funds, are now what holds scale back.
Deposits and stablecoins stop competing
On Monday Will Artingstall, Citi’s head of banking as a service, said the bank had seen strong take-up of tokenised deposits, because clients never have to hold a wallet. On Tuesday, on the panel on tokenised assets and stablecoins, the bank went further: it offers both, partners with Coinbase on stablecoins and is part of a consortium looking at issuing one. “I think it’s an and,” said Ryan Rugg, its global head of digital assets for treasury and trade.
The stablecoin side met the banks halfway. Stripe and Coinbase are both founders of Open USD, the shared stablecoin announced in June that is designed to pass reserve revenue back to the businesses that use it. Shan Aggarwal, Coinbase’s chief business officer, argued that the blocker is no longer technology but coordination: custodians, clearing houses and banks still have to treat a stablecoin as a full dollar, and a clearing house that credits 90 cents for one gives customers every reason not to use it. Neetika Bansal of Stripe said customers rarely ask for stablecoins any more; they ask for cross-border payments that arrive.
That picks up Monday’s theme of the invisible rail. Rugg expects blockchain to go the way of cloud, something nobody asks about, and Aggarwal hopes the category disappears by 2030: “I think we just talk about assets.” The day’s other news pointed the same way: TD Bank said third-party apps will move onto secure API connections through Akoya from the fourth quarter, and Cross River, one of the best-known banks behind fintech products, agreed to buy the branded wallet business Accrue.
What the next conversations will be
Three questions came out of Tuesday that will run well beyond Las Vegas. The first is who vouches for an agent. The FDIC’s voluntary standards body is designed for fintech partners, but its model of common standards and independent assessors is exactly what the agent pilots are reaching for, and the confidence gap Elliptic measured suggests compliance teams know it.
The second is how regulators treat the two forms of digital money now that the market has decided it wants both. The OCC’s final rule under the GENIUS Act is expected before the end of October, and a week before the show Hill said the FDIC will have more work to do on tokenised deposits afterwards, including how to resolve a failed bank whose deposits move at weekends.
The third is the plumbing that turns all of this into ordinary money: clearing houses that accept a stablecoin at face value, banks allowed to hold suspect funds, and payments small enough for agents to make by the thousand. Bansal called stablecoins “agent native money”. Day two suggested the industry agrees. It has not yet agreed who is accountable when that money goes wrong.
Money20/20 USA closes on Wednesday 21 October, with the Money Hall shutting at 12:00 Pacific time.
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