Bryony Naylor: How the World’s Biggest Fintech Show Made the TradFi–DeFi Intersection Real

For three days we sat on the floor at Money 20/20 Europe and interviewed around forty of the people building the future of money. For our final conversation, we did something different: we sat down with the person responsible for building the room they were all standing in. Bryony Naylor is VP for Europe at Money 20/20, and this was the show’s 10-year anniversary and its eighth year in Amsterdam. If you want to understand why crypto and traditional finance suddenly feel like one industry rather than two, she is the person to ask because this year her team did not just host that conversation. They built the intersection itself.

It is a fitting note to end on. Five years ago, as Naylor and I both acknowledged, standing at this event with a crypto outlet like Cryptofocus would have been faintly taboo. This year, that conversation was centre stage, with its own dedicated space on the floor, a co-branded research report, and an entire book. This is the story of how the world’s biggest fintech show decided the future of money was a convergence, and bet the agenda on it.

A record year, by the numbers

When I asked Naylor how it went, she answered like someone watching every market at once. The show, she said, was up across all the markets the team wanted to be up in: more banks than ever, more DeFi than ever, and more press than the event has ever had, over 420 journalists on site. The headline announcements matched the ambition, from Worldline, Mastercard and ING to the European Payments Initiative on its European-sovereignty push.

The contrast with a year ago is the real signal. In 2025, she noted, stablecoins were the topic everyone was talking about. In 2026, they have become simply the conversation, woven together with AI rather than treated as a curiosity. That shift, from a niche being debated to a default being built on, is precisely what we watched play out interview after interview, and Naylor was watching it from the one seat that sees the whole floor.

Building the intersection on purpose

The phrase Money 20/20 put on its banners this year was “the intersection,” the convergence of traditional finance and decentralized finance, and Naylor was clear it was a deliberate strategy rather than a slogan. The team gave it physical space on the show floor, a dedicated stage, and then went further: a co-branded report with FXC Intelligence in which, she said, around 35% of the articles touched stablecoins and decentralized finance.

“We’re really seeing that convergence of TradFi and DeFi as an exciting thing with the industry, and it’s becoming far more mainstream this year than it ever has been.”

The credit, she explained, goes in part to Money 20/20’s chief strategy and growth officer, who came from the industry (a long stint at BBVA) and whose job is to spot where the next big thing is forming. The bet on the TradFi-and-DeFi intersection was that call, made early enough to shape an entire show around it. From where we were sitting, three days of interviews with the companies living that convergence, it looked less like a prediction and more like a description.

Stablecoins, and Europe’s regulation-first edge

I asked Naylor where stablecoins go in the next six to twelve months, and her answer pushed back gently on a common narrative. Europe is often told it is behind the US on crypto, but she reframed that as a feature rather than a bug. Europe has always led with regulation, she said, pointing to MiCA, and what follows from that regulatory foundation is a wave of genuinely exciting stablecoin development. The EPI’s European-sovereignty announcement at the show was, to her, evidence that Europe is now making real moves, and she expects stablecoins on decentralized rails to become far more mainstream.

That is precisely the dynamic our other guests described from the inside. Paybis’s Konstantin Vasilenko told us that the moment his MiCA licence landed, the banks that had refused him suddenly wanted to work with him, a story Naylor lit up at when I relayed it. And Qivalis’s Marieke Flament, who spoke on the Money 20/20 stage, made the case for a euro stablecoin as a matter of European competitiveness. Regulation-first, in other words, is turning into a head start.

Why the whole ecosystem belongs on stage

One choice I wanted Naylor to explain was the decision to put Fahmi Syed of Midnight centre stage, a privacy project rooted in the Cardano ecosystem with, on the surface, little to do with traditional finance. Her answer was the clearest statement of the event’s philosophy.

“That is the whole ethos of Money 20/20: bringing the entire ecosystem together. It’s all of financial services and anything that touches financial services. It’s super important to get the view from across our wide industry.”

That inclusiveness is also expressed in the book the team launched on the intersection stage, The New Intersection of Money, written by Money 20/20’s own people and profiling companies doing genuinely novel things in the space. Naylor was honest that it reflects where she personally sees the momentum: a lot more blockchain, a lot more crypto, and outlets like ours showing up to cover it. Putting a Cardano-linked privacy project next to the world’s biggest banks is not a contradiction at Money 20/20. It is the entire point.

The pressure of running “the show for Europe”

I told Naylor what our guests kept telling us, and it doubles as a lot of pressure on her team. TransFi’s co-founder said the growing size of his booth, year after year, is how he shows his company’s growth because no other show gives him that. 3S Money’s Ivan Zhiznevsky put it even more starkly: he has to be at Money 20/20 because this is where you prove you are still relevant. How do you carry the weight of being the show that the whole industry treats as the measure of relevance?

Naylor’s answer was gratitude rather than swagger. On the event’s tenth anniversary, she said, the sponsors and delegates are the reason it exists, and the real marker of success is that they come back year after year and get genuine return on being there. The way the team earns that, she explained, is by listening to the floor. A piece of feedback from last year, that people wanted deeper, more participatory content, became the Money Lab stage, a more intimate, roughly 40-person format built for back-and-forth with the speaker, alongside “meet the speakers” sessions that let a conversation continue after it leaves the stage. The show stays the show by treating every year’s feedback as next year’s brief.

Why Amsterdam is the truly global one

Our Canadian guest, Apaylo’s David Koroma, flew in from Winnipeg precisely because, of the three Money 20/20 editions, the European one feels the most global. I asked Naylor whether that is by design. Her answer was revealing: the makeup is actually similar across editions, each is roughly 70% from its home region, Europe here, the US in Vegas, APAC in Asia. What makes Amsterdam feel global is Europe itself. With so many jurisdictions, languages and regulatory wrinkles packed together where a licence in one country does not always travel cleanly to the next, the European show takes on an international flavour that the others, anchored to a single large domestic market, simply do not have. The continent’s complexity is its draw.

Agentic AI, and predicting next year

The undercurrent beneath everything this year was agentic AI, the same two letters on nearly every booth. Naylor was candid that predicting where it goes is hard, with a nice piece of history: Money 20/20’s Las Vegas show was pushing the agentic-AI agenda back in 2023, well ahead of the curve. This year the theme turned concrete, with the Worldline, ING and Mastercard announcement on agentic payments among the signals she is watching. She expects it to keep moving “at the speed of light” over the next six months.

As for how the show keeps predicting these trends at all, Naylor deflected the credit entirely to her content team, who all come from the industry. The process is a year long: research begins in the summer, followed by an open call for content that drew some 800 submissions last year. It is a collaboration between experts who know the field and the industry that tells them what is coming. That, more than any single stage or slogan, is the machine that keeps Money 20/20 a year ahead.

Why this is significant for the Dutch and European reader

If you want one data point that captures where European finance is heading, it is this: the organisation whose entire business is reading the fintech industry a year in advance chose, for its biggest European show, to build the TradFi-and-DeFi intersection into a physical place, a report, and a book. That is not a fringe bet. It is the considered judgment of the people whose job is to be right about what comes next.

For Dutch and European businesses, the takeaway from Naylor’s vantage point matches what we heard from every guest on the floor. The convergence is real, it is accelerating, and Europe’s regulation-first approach, far from leaving it behind, is becoming the foundation that lets it move with confidence. Five years ago, a crypto booth here was a taboo. This year it was the centre of the room. On the evidence of this anniversary show, that is not a swing of fashion. It is the new shape of money, and Amsterdam is where it is being drawn. You can watch the full Money20/20 series on our Cryptofocus channel.