The Next Fintech Wave – AI, Stablecoins and Programmable Trust

3 Trends From Money 2020

This piece first was published on my Forbes column here.

Something felt different at Money 2020 this year. Where previous shows focused on the modernization of the delivery of financial instruments (e.g. better lending, savings, insurance etc) by incumbents or startups – accompanied by the infrastructure to provide it - this year felt like bigger changes were afoot.

Coming off the back of many IPOs and M&A events this year – congrats to Chime (a historical portfolio company) and eToro - the mood was more optimistic. Yet, energy cooled on many of last year’s buzz words like “embedded finance”, “buy now pay later” and “climate finance”.

Looking back on the conference, I sensed energy and big opportunities for the future in a few places in particular:

1. AI is reinventing financial services, in some cases from first principles.

2. Stablecoins are becoming the Internet’s native settlement layer.

3. Regulation and technology are fusing into programmable trust.

1. AI Is Reinventing Financial Services

A few of the largest AI platforms made announcements in recent weeks, including of note, Anthropic with an excel plug-in with multiple financial skills. OpenAI announced integrations into multiple commercial and payments apps.

When I sat down with Mike Krieger, co-founder of Instagram and now Chief Product Officer of Anthropic, I asked him his views about the role of AI in financial services. “I think the companies that are going to grow the fastest are the ones building at the edge of model capabilities. They’re building in a way where every model release makes their product better—they’re letting the model do as much as it can, and it’s only going to get more capable and add more value.”

Anthropic’s approach to product development is built around that idea. Krieger described customers such as Parcha and Decagon who tore out custom code and rebuilt their workflows directly on Claude’s agent SDKs.

What struck me most was his pragmatism about interfaces. “At first I thought chat was too primitive,” he admitted. “Now I think it’s genius. You tell the system what you want, and everything underneath the chat box is what’s changing.” In Anthropic’s world, Claude isn’t a chatbot; it’s a computer—an agentic platform that learns and acts.

If Krieger is exploring AI as product, Sean Neville—best known as co-founder of Circle—is exploring AI as participant. His new venture, Catena Labs, is building what he calls a financial operating system for agents.

“In the future,” Neville told me, “the customers of our products will be AI agents. They’ll need to pay, get paid, borrow, lend—everything humans do.”

The concept of fintech for AI was an emerging theme. Catena, part of a growing class of startups, is developing the plumbing that would make that possible—agent identity, programmable trust, and what he half-jokingly calls Know Your Agent (KYA). “The immediate issue isn’t privacy or price,” he said. “It’s trust. Why would I trust an AI with my money?”

Investors see the same wave building.

Vivek Krishnamurthy of Commerce Ventures told me, “There’s no stopping the train when it comes to human-directed agentic commerce. Discovery and purchase through agentic platforms—ChatGPT, Perplexity—will be mainstream within twelve months.” But, he cautions, “We still have a long way to go on agent-to-agent payments. The ecosystem needs common protocols, identity, and liability standards. When we get there, we’ll disrupt the legacy card and processor value chain.”

Karim Gillani, founder of Luge Capital, added historical context: “The last decade of fintech was about unbundling and rebundling banking products. The next phase will reimagine how those products work fundamentally.”

AI as a building block, and as a customer, will likely be an important component. The next financial products won’t just empower humans with AI—they’ll empower machines to transact safely on our behalf.

2. Stablecoins: From Curiosity to Global Rail

As I have written before, stablecoins have key advantages. “They’re fast, cheap, global, and always on,” stressed Gillani as well. “No other payment rail has all those characteristics.”

Yet, the industry is maturing. People don’t want Tether or USDC,” Neville told me. “They want dollars on their phone.” Circle’s founding thesis in 2013 was simple: put money on Internet rails. That vision has quietly materialized. Stablecoins now power payroll, cross-border remittances, and corporate treasury operations from Lagos to São Paulo. But the next battle is interoperability. “If I have $100 million, I don’t want 50 Amazon Coins and 10 USDC and 40 USDT,” Neville told me. “I need that complexity abstracted.” He predicts a payments-optimized blockchain—multi-stable, gas-free, and near-instant—that becomes the TCP/IP of money.

One challenge: today there are few barriers to entry. Jake Gibson of Better Tomorrow Ventures expects consolidation before that happens. “There are dozens of issuers and on-ramps being funded,” he said, “but payment rails always consolidate. In the end a few large networks will carry the volume.”

This consolidation has a geopolitical dimension. Neville pointed out that the U.S. and China are effectively racing to define the next settlement standard—private stablecoins versus state-issued CBDCs. “The Internet was built through private-sector innovation and public-sector policy,” he said. “That’s how we’ll build the next generation of money.”

Many of these trends are happening concurrently. Jay Ganatra of Infinity Ventures framed the convergence with AI: “AI and stablecoins are finally finding each other. Stablecoins were a solution in search of a problem—AI may be that problem.”

3. Regulation × Technology = Programmable Trust

The third current at Money 2020 was subtler but perhaps equally consequential over the long-term: the merger of compliance and code.

Some of the most interesting conversations weren’t companies delivering financial services, but rather ensuring compliance.

Vivek predicts: “AI lets fintechs sell banks Systems of Action instead of forcing them to replace their Systems of Record. That means they can finally capture SaaS and even payroll budgets—10× the market we’ve been selling into.”

This may not be the exclusive domain of fintech over time. Jeff Green, the President of Hatch Bank told me that he expects to see greater direct linkages between the most regulated institutions (like banks) and the capital providers and players in the ecosystem – which were previously abstracted by fintech platforms.

Where the Next Products Will Emerge

Looking forward, I expect some of the most interesting new fintech innovations not to be a new credit distribution or a embeddable savings tool.

AI will allow the creation of entirely new product categories (something I’m focused on professionally at Fluent Ventures), including by a number of new players. AI is making the diffusion of ideas much more rapidly to new markets, radically accelerating globalization of ideas.

Vivek sees this era as fintech’s second act. “The first 15 years were about digital distribution of existing solutions,” he told me. “The next 15 will fundamentally improve the core value proposition.”

Let’s hope so.