Chris Uriarte and Drew Edmond are back from Money 20/20 and join Yvette Bohanan on this episode to provide their insights on the prevailing themes and standout announcements. 

Tune in to also hear tips for navigating the conference and overall thoughts on the evolution of Money 20/20 and other industry events.

 

 

 

 

 

Yvette Bohanan: Welcome to Payments on Fire. I’m Yvette Bohanan, your host for this episode of Fanning the Flames. And joining me are my colleagues, Chris Uriarte and Drew Edmond, just back, sort of, from Money 20/20. How was it? How are your legs and feet after?

Chris Uriarte: It’s a good question. As you know Yvette, I always like to come back and religiously post my step count every year. And I think on the Tuesday afternoon and evening, I racked up about 17,000 steps just running around the convention center and meeting people and going from dinner to dinner.

So, despite all the cocktails and the hors d’oeuvres at the happy hours, you definitely burn some calories at this conference. No doubt.

Drew Edmond: I don’t know who I’m trying to impress with the shoes that I choose sometimes. I think next time I’m just going to stick with anything that has a sole with the word cloud on it, you know, something very soft and plushy and can get me around without paying for it a couple days later. But yeah, not too bad.

Yvette Bohanan: Get your Uggs out.

Drew Edmond: Yeah. Yeah, I just wear some slippers. I saw some people in the casino wearing slippers, so I don’t see why I can’t wear slippers at the show.

Chris Uriarte: Yeah, exactly. Sure.

Yvette Bohanan: It’s Vegas, anything goes, right. So you’ve been, you’ve both been to this a number of times.

Chris Uriarte: Yep.

Yvette Bohanan: How did this year compare to prior years?

Chris Uriarte: So I think it was similar to prior years from the standpoint that it continues to be a very strong turnout at Money 20/20. We see a lot of the big names continuing to invest a lot of money into this show, both in regard to the manpower that they’ve got present at the show. The size of some of these booths, I mean, some of these booths now are larger than the first house that I bought. It’s pretty incredible what they’re spending on some of these things. The parties, the events, actually big budgets for those.

But, I think just in general, it remains to be a good place to get a lot of meetings in in a short period of time, to have some good conversations with people that represent a variety of different companies and to get some good candid takes on what people are working on, what they think about what’s going on in the industry.

But it is a large event. It is challenging sometimes to manage. I mean, we joke about the size of it, sort of the physical size of the space and the hotel and the convention center, it is large. It’s overwhelming from a people perspective some days, where you’re just drowning in crowds. That hasn’t changed for, and I’m not sure that’s necessarily a good thing, but similar to what we’ve seen in other years. So no real surprises this year regard to what the event actually was, I’d say.

Drew Edmond: It’s definitely a lot of people. Sometimes you think, is there too many people sometimes, talking to somebody in the hallway. Ironically, because we were talking about how it’s less likely to, that you are going to kind of run into somebody in the hallway that you’re like, Oh man, I need to talk to you, I hadn’t planned to do so, I luckily ran into this person. But you know, out of the thousands and thousands of folks, there was a lot of people that I know were there, allegedly, and I never saw them. And there was people that I definitely wanted to talk to that I just didn’t get a chance to.

So, I mean, maybe that’s a good problem to have to a certain extent. But yeah, sometimes you’re up in a tower at a suite having a nice sit down conversation and three minutes later you’ve got to be on the show floor trying to find a booth that’s in the corner somewhere. So, first world problems or something, but it’s a lot going on there.

Yvette Bohanan: So when you did have meetings and you were able to connect, what was the buzz? I mean, I could guess based on everyday headlines, but what were people actually wanting to talk about when they had this opportunity to be face-to-face?

Chris Uriarte: Yeah, I think there’s no surprise when you think about kind of the big picture headlines. I think we’d agree, right, Drew, that both stablecoins and agentic commerce are sort of the big ones to talk about.

And of course, as we get into details with our clients and our partners and our prospects and just people that want to chat with us, there’s all sorts of issues that people want to talk about that’s within our typical Glenbrook sphere that we talk about here on this podcast. We get our feet wet in all different parts of payments. So we do get pretty deep into sort of the nitty gritty operational side.

So everybody wants to talk about a variety of different topics, but when you talk about those big themes this year, agentic commerce, stablecoins, absolutely. Would you agree with me, Drew, on that?

Drew Edmond: 2025, it’s been 1A, 1B, and that order depends on kind of what group you’re in, in terms of what topic they’re caring about most and kind of where they see it fitting into their world. If it’s on the bank, financial institutions, cross border side of the world, you’re going to hear a lot more about stablecoins most likely, versus on kind of the PSP, merchant, commerce angle, agentic, I think, has kind of risen to the top there. So really depends on that group.

But yeah, I think on the agentic front, we talked to a lot of payment service providers. We’re always talking to them, but we specifically always spend a lot of time with them at Money 20/20. And certainly it was top of mind, from slightly different angles in some cases. But the large PSPs that are catering towards mid-market, large enterprise, enterprise merchants, they know that the shift is going to occur, whether it’s tomorrow or over the next several years, which is probably more likely.

But, really making them think about how they are able to serve their customers, the merchants, well in this space. Well, obviously there’s going to be some component of, technically we need to make this work for them. We have to think about this from the fraud perspective. But even organizationally, internally at those companies, how many employees, how many resources are they going to point towards this particular opportunity to make sure that they’re serving their customers well?

Chris Uriarte: And I think, I’m not sure whether it was purposeful or not, but just leading up to Money 20/20, within the last, I’ll say four to six weeks, we’ve had some pretty significant announcements coming from the likes of Google and Stripe and Open AI and other players in the field that have been announcing various technical, proposed technical standards, frameworks, things along those lines.

So you know, there was a lot of discussion about that and about what the industry is hearing and to be quite frank, a lot of confusion, I would say, a lot of questions, right? The top question I think that we keep getting from folks, not just at Money 20/20, but as we’re talking to clients is who’s going to quote unquote win in this kind of arms race that we’re seeing with agentic commerce standards. I’m not sure there is necessarily going to be a clear winner on this. I think it’s more realistic that you’re going to have a lot of things that exist in parallel with each other. But just a lot of confusion, a lot of questions around just trying to make heads or tails of all this information that has been just dropped on them in really just a few weeks time coming into this conference.

Drew Edmond: I kind of refer to it these days as we’re in the agentic commerce sandbox right now, right? We’re seeing these MVPs getting launched with like an Etsy or a Walmart. And people are testing the waters. We’re trying to figure out what does this use case look like? What do consumers actually want? What are the hiccups that we’re going to run into along the way?

We’ve all been kind of playing around with it, testing it a little bit over the weeks and months lately, and it’s still a quite clunky experience, right? I think there’s a lot of things to be ironed out. But folks are moving in that direction and trying to start building those building blocks to enable more folks to maybe participate in it and kind of get a wider set of experimentation to see what this will actually look like in the future.

I think one area that jumped out to me in some of my conversations was it not just the kind of the technical component of how will this work, how do the transactions work, where does each payment method kind of fit into this, what is the interface going to look like, those types of questions. But also just how does this affect the dynamics of the market in general?

Some conversations delve into things like SKU level data. All of a sudden now, I’m a merchant. My entire inventory, all my pricing, my shipping information, all this stuff is now going to be surfaced right through some sort of protocol where agents are talking to each other, they’re able to access this data.

Well, what does that mean now? What does that mean for competitors and their ability to have insight into this level of detail? What about if this data is being passed through within the transaction payload itself, now the networks have access to it, maybe the issuing banks have access to it. Are we going to have declines based on the riskiness of a particular product versus just the overall merchant?

So I think there’s a lot of questions that are rising that I hadn’t really thought of before last week around what information is getting exposed? How is that data being used? Who is getting access to it? What does it mean for the underlying merchant? What does it mean for the card holder? If my bank now all of a sudden knows exactly what I’m buying, et cetera.

Again, we’re always raising more questions and maybe answers at this point in the lifecycle of agentic commerce, but I think this is a really important one to consider.

Chris Uriarte: Yeah, no doubt on that, that a lot of questions around these kind of big picture issues, I think the unsatisfying thing is we just don’t have answers to any of this.

Drew Edmond: Yeah.

Chris Uriarte: Right. And I think it becomes challenging as you are in our space where people look to us as being trusted advisors and subject matter experts, it’s a little bit unsatisfying from my perspective.

I just did a two hour executive update with a client yesterday. We spent almost the whole time on agentic, and there was just a lot of, unfortunately, I don’t know, was a lot of my answers to this. We can speculate a lot, we can give some good guidance as to how they should be thinking about this and how they should be preparing themselves, but right now we are still very, very early in this journey.

Drew Edmond: And I think part of the question too becomes how do we make sure that as this continues to get built out that the right parties are protected in the right way. Obviously there have been multiple consortia developed, right, when we think about the protocols that have been developed, whether it’s from Google or Basis Theory or whoever it might be. Will there be more to come? Who’s to say?

But I think, where do we ensure the merchant voice is heard as it continues to change, who’s advocating on behalf of the consumer to make sure that their privacy, is this something where, in three years, the CFPB is going to come out and be like, Oh my gosh, well this is crazy. Why is this data being transferred? All these types of things that can happen.

Is there a way to get ahead of that now and make sure that we’re building this ecosystem in a way that’s the right way to do it? It’s harder because there’s so many moving parts and we don’t even know really what we’re talking about half the time. So it has to kind of evolve from a technical perspective, test some things out, but make sure that we have some of these points of advocacy across the ecosystem as well.

Chris Uriarte: Yeah. And Drew, I would also say that a lot of these things that we’re talking about, kind of where we stand in the evolution of agentic, is a little bit of the same things we’re hearing with stablecoins as well, although perhaps that’s in a little bit of a different place right now, a little bit more mature place. But still a lot of questions around what this ecosystem looks like and how it’s going to really impact all the players throughout that ecosystem, right.

Yvette Bohanan: How much, I’m just curious, like when you think back to last year, Money 20/20 ’24, how much of the conversation was around agentic?

Chris Uriarte: I would say statistically zero.

Drew Edmond: Exactly.

Yvette Bohanan: Zero. That’s what I’m thinking. Like zero. I think we did a Fanning the Flames after last year. We went back and listened to it. This wasn’t even on the radar, really.

Drew Edmond: No, no way. Yeah.

Yvette Bohanan: And I think you’re bringing up all the right points, Drew, it is a sandbox. I think that everyone was racing to get out of the gate on this stuff, and now people are like, wait a second, we actually have to try to do this. And there’s a lot.

And I’m all for creating some kind of a standard, but it’s, those standards are not completely flushed out yet. And the rules around it, who’s governing the rules? You can’t just let everybody make up their own rules with the standard

Drew Edmond: And I think that’s one of the challenges too, right? Is that, and maybe a partial segue into stablecoins, but of course cards will be a component of agentic commerce. Certainly they’re still a major payment method, but they won’t be the only payment method being used in agentic commerce.

We already know PayPal, right, has a relationship or a partnership with OpenAI to bring them in as digital wallet. If you get download the Perplexity browser and they’re using Stripe link, you can add your bank account, pay by bank. There’s going to be local payment methods in countries around the world. There may be stablecoins or other forms of crypto that make sense.

When I think about the parameters required for agentic payments, how far away from that is just the notion of programmable money in the first place, right? Being able to put some parameters around when this transaction can be unlocked to do a certain thing based on these sets some parameters.

So all of a sudden we have a very wide set of opportunities for how consumers might ultimately engage with this channel. And yeah, we’re going to get some, probably some card network rules and standards and the cards are going to work in this particular way. But Visa doesn’t set the rules for stablecoins, and Visa doesn’t set the rules for PayPal and pay by bank, like that, right?

So how do we make sure that there’s consistency across those different payment methods when there’s no grand arbiter of payments?

Yvette Bohanan: Right. Yeah. So both brought up stablecoins and crypto, so that’s probably the other hot topic, right? What’s going on there? What did you hear about that?

Chris Uriarte: Stablecoins, it’s an interesting one because there’s so much hype about it. But where we focus a lot on the PSP level and the merchant level. I’ll go back to say that there probably still is a lot of confusion or questions amongst merchants around where stablecoins fit in their lives.

So right now I would say that the majority of the conversation, the strong use cases for stablecoins is, as we’ve talked about on this podcast, Yvette, I know you and Russ have pontificated on some of this, just very recently on a recent Fanning the Flames episode. A lot of the key use cases that we’re seeing, which make a lot of sense, is around cross border movement of money, around sort of back office and treasury related functions.

But when it comes to kind of retail payments, merchant acceptance of stablecoins in a shopping cart, I think we still got a long way to go there. But nonetheless, tons of conversation around stablecoins. I know, Drew, you’ve been tracking this closely and we’re paying a lot of attention to this at Money 20/20, so might be good if you gave the audience some of your thoughts there.

Drew Edmond: Again, going back a year to now, it’s gone from something that was lightly talked about to something that’s, it’s real, right? It’s a real thing now. It’s gone from kind of an interesting experiment to really a mainstream expectation, if not kind of complete usage across all use cases.

Cross border, obviously, is a main use case that people are bringing up. You see someone like a Western Union who’s been around for a thousand years, it feels like, but maybe more realistically, 50 to 150, depending on how you want to measure it. But they’re introducing the idea of using stablecoins in their ecosystem. And if they’re doing that, to me it’s some level of validation, certainly. The proof will ultimately be in the pudding of how often are they using it, what corridors are they using it for as the ecosystem continues to emerge? Is it the expectation that people are holding onto these stablecoins or are a hundred percent of them converting them back to fiat?

And this is going to take time regardless, right? And it’s going to depend on these kind of clusterings of growth and usage and how different jurisdictions approach them and things like that. So we’re still in the early days, certainly. But I think at this point I can feel relatively confident saying, yeah, this is going to be a method of moving money and storing value that isn’t going away, right.

A lot of these companies have been building in the dark for 5, 6, 7, 8 years, right. When crypto came out and had their initial boom, there’s stablecoin companies that are many years old now, and they are kind of now emerging to say, Hey, we have, we’re starting to build this infrastructure and we’re evolving and being able to provide a real value prop out in the market today. So, yeah, I think you definitely see that.

You see a lot of conversation at the financial institution level saying, Well, what is stablecoin strategy? What is our crypto strategy? Where do we fit into this world? We don’t want to be usurped by all these newfangled startups that have been building for a few years. We want to have a place at the table. So, tokenized deposit conversations, stablecoin conversations. Is every bank going to launch their own stablecoin? I think there’s still a lot to figure out, but it’s certainly a real conversation today.

Yvette Bohanan: So a lot of agentic, a lot of digital currency stuff. What are you not hearing? The conversation

Chris Uriarte: Yeah.

Yvette Bohanan: very of the moment when you go to this particular conference. What was surprisingly absent in the discussions this year?

Chris Uriarte: Yeah. So if our listeners have nothing to do this weekend, they could go back through our archives and listen to our recaps from previous years. If you go back three or four years ago, maybe it was three years ago, we talked about how the exhibit floor was just filled with vendors from the IDV space. So data, data, data. And I would say that that has pretty much disappeared almost this year.

So, our prediction was that you would probably either not see a lot of these players in coming years because there would be consolidation acquisitions, many of them that have gone out of business, et cetera. And I think that maybe has been the case.

And then if you kind of fast forward, maybe to two years ago, before the crypto winter really took full fledge, two, two and a half years ago, we saw tons of crypto on the floor, crypto, crypto, crypto. And now, that has changed as well. You don’t see as much of a crypto thing as we’ve talked about. Stablecoins obviously is the big theme in this world. But anything that was crypto was taking up a lot of floor space, the exhibit space. And that has dramatically been reduced over the last couple years.

But I think just in general, what we’re seeing is investment in the show from a lot of the big names as we’ve talked about. And the show floor and the topics that we’ve seen have been very reflective of what folks have been reading about in the trade press and in the mainstream news most certainly.

Yvette Bohanan: Speaking of news, everyone saves, they keep their powder dry, if you will, ’til the big Money 20/20. And then they all need an announcement. What were the big unveils that kind of caught your attention here? Because not every unveil is really a big unveil.

Chris Uriarte: Well, there was a lot, right? And we could do a five hour episode just on press releases, but I think there’s some interesting things that we’ve heard from a few of the big players that talk about sort of the direction in where the world is moving.

Drew mentioned, for example, Western Union and the announcement with Western Union was that they’re going to start a stablecoin partnership with Solana. So when you think about them as being sort of the OG in the cross-border money movement world, to hear them talk about perhaps evolving and adopting to this new reality of stablecoins, playing a very critical role in cross-border money movement. I think that’s a pretty big message, right?

And Western Union is not really known for their innovation, but they’re kind of known for their stability, their global reach, the fact that you could find a Western Union agent in the smallest of small towns in the hills of some country, that’s what they’re known for. And they have continued to build on that reputation over many, many decades, if not a century plus. So, to hear the innovation around stablecoins for them, I think is really, really interesting.

The other thing that, we’ve obviously spoken about these agentic partnerships, these agentic standards. We had some announcements from PayPal, PayPal saying that they are going to adapt the ACP protocol and they are going to partner with AI to have their PayPal wallet embedded right in the Open AI, sort of the Buy button, in Chat GPT. So, you see kind of where this is going here.

OpenAI, I think continues to be one of those premier partnerships that a lot of folks, both from kind of the payment side and also from the seller side, from the merchant side, are lining up to partner with. So you’ve heard announcements from OpenAI saying that Chat GPT is going to be directly integrated with the likes of Shopify and their broad global platform with Walmart was announced just recently within the last few weeks, with Etsy of course, which has kind of been a flagship there. And there’s no doubt that there’s probably many, many retailers that are in the queue. And we’ll be hearing some more press releases there as well.

I had the opportunity to interview some of the senior folks from Mastercard again live on the showroom floor. We do our Money Pot Fraudwatch podcast every year. MasterCard talked a lot about sort of the evolving risk landscape in the payments world, and one of the things that they highlighted was the launch of what they call Mastercard Threat Intelligence.

We’ve talked a little bit about this in different forums and podcasts and media things that we’ve done over the course of the past year. But Mastercard made a billion dollar plus acquisition this past, or last year I should say, of a company called Recorded Future. And Recorded Future was a threat intelligence company that really lived more in, I would consider them to be in the pure cybersecurity space.

And I think of this as kind of a big headline in the world of payments risk management, because it shows kind of a theme that you and I, Yvette, have talked about for many years now is this convergence of kind of the cybersecurity world with kind of the pure payments risk management and fraud prevention world.

And Mastercard is really trying to kind of bring that to life through this acquisition and kind of giving credence to the fact that that threat intelligence data is today a really, really important part of overall payments risk management. So it was very interesting to hear their philosophy on that. I know that’s something that’s sort of close to home that you and I have spoke about significantly over the years.

Yvette Bohanan: Ironically, Chris, when you were sitting there in the Money Pot talking about it with Mastercard, I was at a different conference. And it was the first time that they had put together their security and their risk management groups into a forum for a keynote address on risk and fraud. So maybe people are acknowledging this more and more, so this is a good thing. Yay. Yay. Keep it up.

Chris Uriarte: Yeah. And the last one I’ll note is there was an interesting announcement, I mean, we get a lot of announcements from the PSPs, no doubt, about new customers that they’ve acquired. But announcement from Checkout.com talking about how they’ve now partnered with Uber and are going to be supporting Uber at a global level across many geographies for core payment processing. And I think, Drew, we continue to profile Checkout.com because they’re kind of a little different from the rest, right? They’ve been very heads down on e-commerce focus, right?

Yvette Bohanan: Well, and this is, this one seems good, like obviously a good thing, but also kind of an interesting under the hood announcement. Like, good for Uber, good for Checkout, but kind of like how the sausage is made underneath Uber. It’s a very back office kind of announcement.

Chris Uriarte: For sure. And I think they’re bucking the trend a little bit with the global PSPs, where Stripe, in particular, most recently has really been trying to make more of a play to get into the card present world, into the POS world, and Adyen, of course, has been there for a number of years, where Checkout has stood up and firmly announced that that is not where they’re going to play. They’re going to try to be a best in class provider to pure online e-commerce merchants. And we think that they’ve taken a good measured approach at continuing to improve their solution set over the years.

Yvette Bohanan: Yeah. No, it’s interesting though because when you think about it, like a lot of the reason for Money 20/20 back, well, before 2020 was it was the fintech scene. It was the startup scene. Investors showing up trying to find fintechs. It was fintechs on stage pitching, essentially doing pitches to investing, investment groups in the audience, right?

To hear like Checkout.com and Uber partnership, or PayPal with Google Cloud, Western Union, Mastercard. These are the headlines that you’re giving me here on this and where are the little guys? Like, are they still there?

Chris Uriarte: They are still there and it’s a good question. Perhaps we’re kind of skipping over them, but Money 20/20 is still trying to foster that sort of startup fintech-y environment. They have something that I think is called like the FinTech Village or something along those lines. A couple other forums focused on it.

And, one of the big themes when I was looking at some of the recaps of the conference that other journalists and such were saying was really talking about the evolution of fintech, how I think, really to your point Yvette, is we are in a very different place now where fintech, when this conference first started, was thought as, the word fintech was almost synonymous with like startup-y, techie, et cetera.

There’s a couple journalists that called out theme that Money 20/20 is sort of pushing, is that fintech is now really just a generic term and represents a broad representation of sometimes very mature companies now. And is fintech really just becoming the next generation of financial services? Like at what point even does that term go away perhaps?

So it’s a good question and I think some of the heart of early Money 20/20 is probably still there, but of course the big names are dominating the headlines. They’re funding it. They’ve got those big footprints on the showroom floor.

Yvette Bohanan: Yeah. Well, and that makes sense. I mean, when we go into workshops and we talk about stakeholders, we ask people where in the stakeholder chart do you see fintechs? Because it’s not its own box, right? And basically we say in every provider category.

Chris Uriarte: Every provider category is what we say, right?

Yvette Bohanan: Like they’re there. And so maybe this is that sort of natural evolution.

Where do you see this conference headed? We’re now in the double entendre stage of Money 20/20, right? We’re not approaching the year 2020. It’s more like 20/20 vision, getting clarity on what’s going on, right. But do you see this thing having steam and staying power? Is it going to keep going? Is Stripe sessions or something else going to displace its dominance?

Chris Uriarte: Well, maybe I’ll speak about Money 20/20 itself and Drew can give his perspective on some of the other conferences and such that are gaining steam. I think Money 20/20 is still going to play an important part. If you just look at the sheer amount of people that are attending this event, it would be very difficult to make an argument that next year people are just not going to show up. I think that’s a difficult argument to make.

The question will be, can they sort of maintain their staying power over the course of the next decade or so, as we see, you mentioned Stripe Sessions. That’s just one example. But we continue to hear about more, what I’ll call kind of provider-led conferences and things along those lines that are getting better and better quality.

We’ve heard couple of these provider conferences that have taken place this past year that the merchants and the partners that have attended that have said, This is a really, really good event. We’ve got to talk to a lot of people. It’s much more curated from a content perspective. I don’t feel like I’m as overwhelmed. And, people, as we know, they have to make a decision about where they spend their money and where they spend their time. So I think Money 20/20 will continue to see increasing competition from a lot of the traditional conferences as, as well as some of the new efforts that continue to go on.

And, I think just as Money 20/20 has evolved into this behemoth over the course of the last decade, I think Stripe Sessions has turned into, this little sort of Stripe user group, into this like Steve Jobs-like type multi-day event. And I know you’re close to their events, Drew, and I’ve attended a number of them. I don’t know if you agree with that, but it seems like they’ve got some good steam behind them there.

Drew Edmond: I think about conferences like a product, right? Like what’s your value prop? Who’s your target customer? What are you trying to accomplish? And I think that at Money 20/20, they’re doing a lot, right. There’s a lot going on there. To your point, it’s like we didn’t really touch much on kind of what’s the startup community doing? What does the investment community think about some of the startups? It almost gets lost in the fray a little bit, right?

It’s a village, inside of country of Money 20/20. FinTech Villages over here, where, to your point, like there was a reason why they did that in the first place, right? There was the need for the kind of this exposure for those groups to talk to these people, and that need still exists.

I think there’s also, obviously you have the FinTech Meetups of the world, which are kind of specifically saying, Hey, we know that a lot of you are just coming to meet with each other, right? You don’t care about sessions, you don’t care about going to this or that. Watching somebody on stage, you literally just want to have as many meetings as you can bang out in two and a half days or whatever it might be, right?

So it’s like you’re starting to see these kind of part and parcel, like more specific products emerge in the market for serving these more specific needs that kind of get bundled up in the grand array of Money 20/20.

So I think the question ends up being like, does Money 20/20, are they kind of going in too many directions or will people continue to go there? Unless those needs are served by other conferences that might emerge or that are emerging to Chris’s point.

We have Stripe. I was at the EBANX Summit, Payment Summit in Mexico City earlier this year. That was a fantastic event. Is it that people want more targeted, curated events that are really close to kind of exactly the type of people that they want to be interacting with and getting maybe more curated sessions that are focused on those issues? Or do you benefit from this really wide array of attendees?

Yvette Bohanan: So assuming you both are going next year,

Drew Edmond: I assume I’ll be there.

Yvette Bohanan: How do you get the most out of two and a half days in Vegas?

Chris Uriarte: Yeah. Well first of all, whether you’re a coffee drinker or not, I suggest you become a coffee drinker prior to the event because they’re long days most definitely, generally starting at breakfast all the way up to late nights. That definitely could be your agenda if you plan well.

Our recommendation to folks, and we’ve learned this over the years, is plan, plan, plan. Don’t wait to get there to set up meetings. Don’t even leave things kind of wishy-washy with people. It’s like, Oh, yeah, yeah, let’s get together, because what you’ll find is that either your time has been taken up by somebody else or you don’t have a place to meet, or their schedule has gone crazy and it just sort of doesn’t happen.

So, I think we’ve gotten a lot better at securing our meetings ahead of time and trying to figure out where we’re going to meet. I think that’s another, I think there’s probably, maybe our next bootcamp needs to be a logistical course on how to handle Money 20/20 because we’ve certainly learned things over the years. The one thing that I always recommend to folks is always have a meeting place planned out with someone. If you just kind of leave that open and an hour or two before you think you’re just going to set that up, you’ll find that they are a 25 minute walk away from where you are, and it’s difficult to do that.

The one tip that I will always give to folks who are attending the conference, just this is more kind of logistics slash common courtesy is there are a lot of people, because of the cost of attending Money 20/20, that don’t actually buy badges, but do show up. And, if you are setting up a meeting with someone, just be very, very clear with them about where you’re going to be and where to meet.

Because if you have folks that have a badge that are on the showroom floor, and you ask them to come meet you in the hotel and then expect them to go back to the showroom floor, that’s probably a good waste of 30 to 40 minutes of their time just walking to visit you. So I would suggest that you know, you set expectations correctly with whoever you’re meeting with, particularly if you’re trying to sell something to someone. If you’re the one that’s selling to someone, it’s not great to expect your prospect to take 45 minutes out of their schedule just to walk and to find you because you didn’t buy a badge for the show.

Drew Edmond: I would say buy chapstick, first of all, the desert will always dry you out. Leave a little bit of buffer time for that travel time. I think I’ve done it in the past where I was scheduling back to back to backs 30 minutes.

Chris Uriarte: No, no, no.

Drew Edmond: And you’ve got have, in some cases, 10, 15 minutes to get somewhere. So if you know where you’re going to be to Chris’s point, you can plan your time a little bit better. And I would say maybe something that I’m going to try to do a little bit more of next year is actually leave a little bit of white space for exploration and for running into people and things like that.

And have that opportunity to, who knows where the payments Gods will take you and run you into at the coffee shop or at the, what was the Love fountain is now the Wizard of Oz at the Sphere.

Chris Uriarte: The Wizard of Oz fountain.

Drew Edmond: Yeah. Which, by the way, I went and saw and it was fantastic. I highly recommend it.

Chris Uriarte: It’s at the, you’re talking about the Wizard of Oz movie at the Sphere.

Drew Edmond: The Sphere. Yes. Yes. It was fantastic.

Chris Uriarte: Yeah. It looks great.

Yvette Bohanan: Welcome home. I know you guys are on the road again in like 30 minutes, but thanks for stopping in doing some Fanning the Flames. And to all of you listening, keep up the good work. Hopefully we’ll see you all at a conference in the near future or some venue. Until then, bye for now.