It was good to reconnect with so many investors and operators at Money20/20 Amsterdam. The tone this year was less about new narratives than about consolidation: who buys, who builds, who partners, and who gets bought. For allocators, that shift matters more than any keynote. If we did not get the chance to connect, I will be in London on 1 and 2 July for IGB Live and glad to trade notes.
Here is what should be on your radar.
Mastercard agreed to buy BVNK for up to $1.8bn, stepping in after Coinbase's roughly $2bn run at the same company collapsed last November. Behind it sit Stripe's $1.1bn purchase of Bridge and Ripple's $200m acquisition of Rail, with S&P counting at least fourteen stablecoin transactions in 2025. The networks are not buying tokens. They are buying licensed, enterprise-grade rails they cannot build fast enough.
Investor lens: The comps are now set. Re-rate licensed stablecoin-infrastructure positions, and underwrite for licensure, settlement volume, and execution rather than narrative. The premium is paid for regulated rails with real flow, not for abstractions sitting on top of them.
MiCA's transitional window closes on 1 July. Only 194 crypto firms across the EU held a full licence by May, in a market that counted more than 3,000 registered businesses two years ago, and France has said it will treat operating without a licence as a criminal matter. We saw the template in stablecoins: Tether's USDT was pulled from the major European exchanges for non-compliance, while Circle's USDC and its euro counterpart kept their place.
Signal for LPs: A hard-won licence is now a balance-sheet asset, and sub-scale or non-compliant names are turning into acquisition targets or write-offs. Diligence licence status and capital adequacy across the book, and recognize the consolidation as a buy-side opportunity for funds with dry powder and the patience to roll up licensed but sub-scale operators.
PSD3 and the PSR replace PSD2, with the substantive obligations landing largely in 2028. The payment-institution and e-money-institution regimes merge into one licence, non-banks gain more direct access to the rails, liability shifts to whoever performs authentication, and pay-by-bank gets a regulatory tailwind. Existing licensees will have to re-authorize to a higher bar on capital, safeguarding, and governance.
Implication for funds: Stress-test every payments and BaaS thesis that rests on a bank-partnership moat, because PSD3 hands that access to everyone. Favor licensed principals and own-the-customer models, underwrite the re-authorization cost now, and expect a consolidation wave to follow the rulebook, arriving in payments a year or two behind crypto.
Visa's Intelligent Commerce and Mastercard's Agent Pay have both shipped tokenized agent credentials, which means the payment step itself is commoditizing into the networks. The harder, unsolved problems sit upstream: machine-readable product data, verified agent identity, and unresolved dispute and liability when the buyer is an agent rather than a person.
Investor edge: Back the picks-and-shovels rather than the consumer agent apps. The durable value is in product-data and catalog infrastructure, agent identity and trust, and fraud and dispute tooling built for agentic flows. Treat liability ambiguity as a live underwriting risk for any merchant-facing model and price it accordingly.
Strategic buyers, the networks and the incumbent fiat-rails fintechs, are active and paying premiums for infrastructure they cannot clone, and most of them will buy rather than build. Two datapoints from the week underline where mandates are consolidating: the UK Payments Initiative went live on 2 June, the first new UK payment scheme since Faster Payments in 2008, and Adyen displaced Stripe to win GOV.UK Pay, a mandate worth up to £25.3m across roughly a thousand public-sector services.
Key takeaway for GPs: This is a harvest window for the right assets. Get portfolio companies acquisition-ready now, with a clean data room, the licence in hand, and execution metrics that survive diligence, rather than holding out for the next markup. The premium is paid at signing, and readiness is what captures it.
Stablecoin rails: back licensed, enterprise-ready enablers; the M&A comps are set.
MiCA fallout: diligence licence status; hunt sub-scale, licensed roll-up targets.
PSD3: de-risk bank-partnership moats; favor principals who hold the licence.
Agentic payments: own the enabling infrastructure, not the consumer app.
Exits: ready your strongest infrastructure assets now; strategics are paying premiums.
Money20/20 2026 was less about what is new than about what is consolidating. The destination is no longer in doubt and the route is mostly unbuilt, which is precisely where disciplined capital, with the right underwriting, tends to outperform. If you are allocating behind payments, stablecoin infrastructure, or embedded finance, I would be glad to trade notes on where your thesis intersects.
I will be in London on 1 and 2 July for IGB Live, or we can schedule a deeper conversation.
Securities Offered through Wellesley Hills Securities. Member FINRA/SIPC
