What We're Watching in Amsterdam This Year
Money20/20 Europe opens at RAI Amsterdam on June 2nd. The MMG team will be there — and the conversations we're looking forward to map almost exactly onto what's been happening in the European payment landscape this year.
Money20/20 Europe is three days, one venue, and approximately 8,500 people from across payments, banking, fintech, and financial infrastructure. It's the event where the conversations that have been building across the industry throughout the year get compressed into a single week of keynotes, meetings, and hallway exchanges that often turn out to matter more than the main stage.
For us at MMG, the agenda this year feels particularly close to home. The themes that dominate the run-up to Amsterdam — European payment sovereignty, open banking, real-time infrastructure, the regulatory tightening around high-risk processing — are exactly the topics we've been covering on this blog and navigating with merchants every day. Here's what we're watching.
The European Payment Infrastructure Story
The biggest structural story in European payments right now is the acceleration of the continent's own payment infrastructure — and Amsterdam is where a significant portion of that story is being told. Wero has crossed 50 million registered users. The EuroPA Alliance MoU was signed in February. iDEAL's migration to Wero is underway in the Netherlands, where this year's event is taking place. The digital euro is advancing through the European Parliament.
These are not future scenarios anymore — they are live infrastructure decisions with real commercial consequences for merchants operating across EU markets. The conversations at Money20/20 about A2A payments, open banking rails, and interoperability between national payment schemes will be worth tracking closely for anyone thinking about where European payments are heading in 2027 and 2028.
VAMP, Risk Management, and the Acquirer Relationship
Visa's VAMP programme — which came into force in April 2025 and tightened its thresholds again in April 2026 — has changed the compliance calculus for acquirers and high-risk merchants in ways that are still being absorbed across the industry. The shift from separate fraud and dispute monitoring programs to a single combined ratio, with acquirers held directly accountable for their portfolio-level numbers, has accelerated de-risking decisions and tightened the market for high-risk merchant accounts.
At Money20/20, we expect significant discussion around how acquirers are managing their portfolios under VAMP, what the new threshold environment means for high-risk verticals, and how merchants can position themselves to maintain stable processing relationships in this context. These are conversations MMG has every day — and the event gives us the chance to hear how the broader industry is approaching the same challenges.
AI in Payments: Substance Over Hype
Every major event in payments features AI prominently on the agenda, and Money20/20 2026 is no different. The specific applications we're most interested in are the ones with direct operational relevance for high-risk merchants: AI-powered fraud scoring and transaction risk analysis, real-time chargeback prediction, and the increasingly sophisticated underwriting models that acquirers are using to make portfolio decisions faster and with more granularity than manual review allows.
The question we'll be asking — and that we think the most useful sessions will answer — is not whether AI is being applied to payments, but which applications are producing measurable outcomes for merchants and acquirers at scale, and which are still in the pilot phase. The gap between marketing claims and operational reality tends to close at events like this, where the practitioners are in the room.
Regulation: PSD3, the PSR, and What's Next
PSD3 and the Payment Services Regulation remain in the legislative pipeline, with the European Parliament expected to make progress during 2026. Money20/20 will inevitably feature significant discussion of where the regulation stands, what the implementation timeline looks like, and what the practical consequences are for payment institutions, acquirers, and merchants. We've covered PSD3 in detail on this blog — the event will give us a chance to pressure-test those assessments against what practitioners on the ground are actually planning for.
Let's Meet in Amsterdam
If you're attending Money20/20 Europe and you work in high-risk payments — as a merchant, a payment professional, or anywhere in the acquiring ecosystem — we'd genuinely like to connect. The MMG team will be at RAI Amsterdam across all three days, June 2nd through 4th.
Whether you're looking to talk through a processing setup, explore an acquiring relationship, or simply have the kind of conversation that works better in person than over email — reach out before the event and let's put time in the diary. You can contact us directly through the MMG website. Or Email us directly.