Money 20/20 USA 2025

Last month, David Birch was back in Las Vegas for Money 20/20 USA 2025 held at the Venetian Resort Conference Centre. This year, Dave’s sessions, which both took place on the packed Emergent Stage, were focused on AI and Know-Your-Agent (KYA).

Panel at Money 20/20 USA 2025: Who’s In Control? Agentic AI & Future of Financial Power

Dave was joined on stage by Sophia Bantinidis, Head of Future of Finance at CitiBank and Greg Ulrich, Chief AI & Data Officer at Mastercard. The session focused on how AI assistants are evolving into autonomous agents that make financial decisions without human input. This raises critical questions about control and accountability in our economic systems.

The panel examined agentic AI development and its impact on financial services. They explored current use cases, adoption trends, and which players stand to gain or lose power. Will BigTechs and FinTechs dominate while traditional banks struggle to adapt?

The discussion focused on what makes agentic AI fundamentally different from previous technologies.

When AI acts independently, who bears responsibility for its actions?
How do we balance automation benefits against the need for transparency and oversight?
Who builds these autonomous systems?
Who regulates them?
And most importantly, who ultimately controls financial power when machines make the decisions?

Money 20/20 USA 2025: David Birch on stage with Sophia Bantinidis and Greg Ulrich for Who's In Control? Agentic AI & Future of Financial Power

Fireside chat at Money 20/20 USA 2025: The Know-Your-Agent (KYA) Problem And Potential Solutions

On day 3 of the event, David was back on the Emergent Stage for a fireside chat with Mastercard’s EVP Global Head of Identity, Dennis Gamiello. The session covered how we are entering the era of agentic commerce, which includes agentic payments and agentic finance. For this to function effectively, we need a process similar to KYC (Know Your Customer), but focused on agents instead of individuals. Welcome to the new world of Know-Your-Agent (KYA). Explore the importance and challenges of KYA in this new landscape. They started with the basics and went onto examine early initiatives in this field and discussed potential pathways to develop the next generation of financial market infrastructure, covering off the following questions:

What does “Know Your Agent” mean in the context of financial services, and how does it differ from traditional KYC? What kind of infrastructure or partnerships will be needed to build a robust KYA framework?
There is a two-fold challenge: verifying both the human and the bot. What are the biggest hurdles in verifying that a bot is truly permissioned to act on behalf of a human?
Bots operating 24/7 create friction when humans are required to complete onboarding. What are some real-world examples where this friction has led to lost revenue or failed onboarding?
The concept of agent safeguards is compelling. How is Mastercard thinking about leveraging machine learning to enforce boundaries and prevent hallucinations or unauthorized actions by agents?
From a consumer perspective, what’s the value proposition of agentic commerce? How do we balance convenience with security?
What’s your vision for the future of agentic identity? Will we reach a point where bots can open accounts, make purchases, and resolve disputes entirely autonomously?

As Banzpay summarised after the event:

“Agentic finance is coming—carefully. There are real challenges to solve around standards, risk, and governance. It was standing room only to listen into a discussion between David Birch and Dennis Gamiello from Mastercard who underscored There are real challenges to solve around standards, risk, and governance and that standardisation will determine how quickly the benefits show up in market.“