Silicon Valley dominates banking conference

Payments-services firms PayPal, Square, Visa and MasterCard rose to record highs this month

Maybe this is what Barclays Plc’s Jes Staley was trying to warn his competitors about, when he said this week that banks will need to defend advantages in the payments business from encroachment by tech firms.

More than 11,000 people from 4,500 companies descended on Las Vegas this week to unveil the latest payments technologies and partnerships. It was part of an annual pilgrimage for the industry to the Money 20/20 conference.

But there was something different about this year’s conference: Some of the biggest speakers weren’t bankers. They were from companies such as Apple Inc, Facebook Inc and Amazon.com Inc.

Jennifer Bailey, the head of Apple Pay, was on the agenda. Facebook’s Stan Chudnovsky, head of product at the company’s Messenger service; and Patrick Gauthier, vice president of Amazon Pay were there. The conference came after payments-services companies PayPal Holdings Inc, Square Inc, Visa Inc and MasterCard Inc rose to records this month.

Some of the big themes:

Fintech acquisitions

JPMorgan Chase & Co said this week it plans to purchase the start-up WePay, its first acquisition of a so-called fintech company. Until now, lenders have largely turned to partnerships or building their own technology to expand in payments. Now, the question for the thousands of hungry entrepreneurs at Money 20/20 is whether JPMorgan’s acquisition will open the floodgates for other banks to do their own deals.

Equifax hack

When Equifax Inc announced last month that hackers were able to access information on 145 million US consumers, it revived the debate about how firms should verify the identity of users. High-profile breaches pressure banks to abandon static passwords in favour of biometrics and other forms of authentication. And there are many companies waiting to help lenders solve that problem.

Crypto craziness

Blockchain enthusiasts will probably continue pitching banks and other firms on the wonders of the distributedledger technology. But this year, cryptocurrencies and initial coin offerings might be the bigger headline as the price of bitcoin, the most ubiquitous of the currencies, has jumped.