Bretton at Money20/20 USA 2026

Three days in Las Vegas, a magazine launch, 1oz of 24k gold, and a closer look at how AI is reshaping financial crime compliance.

Every October, Money20/20 takes over Las Vegas. For three days, banks, fintechs, payments companies and investors gather around the same question: what will the next decade of banking look like? This year, much of the answer centered on AI agents and how quickly they can take on real work inside a bank.

The Bretton team was right in the middle of it. Between demos at our booth and meetings across the conference floor, we spent the week with institutions of every size, from community banks to some of the largest in the world. Many of the people we met were C-suite leaders and VPs who own compliance, fraud and risk, and who are now deciding how AI fits into that work.

Here’s a look back at our time in Vegas, from the launch of our new print magazine to the discussions defining the next phase of AI in financial crime compliance.

Launching The Standard

Bank executives make decisions that shape whole communities, often far from the financial centers that get the headlines. As our co-founder and CEO Will Lawrence writes in his founder’s letter, “almost nobody is writing about it seriously.”

That gap is why we started The Standard, a quarterly print magazine about the institutions that move money and the leaders transforming them. The idea behind it is simple: “the people doing the work of banking deserve coverage held to the same standard as that work.”

Issue 01 is our first step toward that commitment. It features perspectives from bank leaders, regulators and investors on the topics shaping the industry:

• The Art of Banking: our cover profile of Emprise Bank CEO Matt Michaelis
• Of Whales and Agents: former Acting Comptroller of the Currency Michael Hsu on risk management in the age of agentic AI
• NBA Veteran Invests in Rural Iowa Banking: Paul Davis on why NBA veteran Harrison Barnes bought into a rural Iowa bank
• On the Nature of Money: five thousand years of money, from Mesopotamian clay tablets to Bitcoin
• Letter from our Founder: a note from Will Lawrence

To celebrate the launch, we hosted a dinner for bank executives, with Matt Michaelis as our guest. By the end of the conference, nearly 1,000 copies had gone home with readers.

If you missed it in Vegas, you can request a copy of Issue 01 and we’ll mail one to you.

Going for the gold

The magazine wasn’t the only thing that drew a crowd. Once again, we put an ounce of 24k gold up for grabs at our booth.

More than 150 attendees reserved a key, and only one could open the lockbox. On Tuesday afternoon, everyone gathered for the big moment.

Congratulations to Lorin Herman, whose key opened the lockbox. He left Money20/20 with the most memorable souvenir of the conference. Thank you to everyone who reserved a key and joined us. It was one of the highlights of our week.

If you missed it this time, you’ll have another chance. We plan to bring the gold bar back at future events, and we hope to see you there.

The main takeaways

The most valuable part of the week was the conversations themselves. Across institutions large and small, the discussion moved quickly past what AI can do and into how to put it to work. Three themes stood out.

Alert volumes are outpacing analyst capacity

Institution after institution described the same challenge: alerts are coming in faster than analysts can work through them. The volumes differ enormously, but the gap looks the same.

Many institutions have leaned on outsourced teams to keep up. Others want to grow without their teams having to grow at the same pace. For both, AI agents are quickly becoming part of the plan for closing that gap.

Banks want AI that works inside the systems they already have

The idea that drew the biggest reaction all week was an audit-ready agent that runs inside a bank’s existing systems and can be live in a single day. For teams bringing AI into regulated work, that combination matters. They can start without replacing the tools their analysts rely on, and every decision the agent makes is documented and ready for an examiner to review. We wrote about how that works at Bretton in Agent-in-a-Day.

Sponsor banks are scaling oversight alongside growth

For sponsor banks, growth and oversight go hand in hand. Every new fintech partner brings more customers onboard and more activity to monitor, from KYC and KYB reviews to ongoing transaction monitoring, and the bank stays responsible for all of it. The leaders we spoke with are excited to keep expanding their partner programs, and they see strong oversight as what makes that growth possible. As regulators continue to raise expectations, the banks that can scale oversight alongside their partnerships will be best positioned to succeed.

Where this goes next

Taken together, these conversations point to 2027 as the year many institutions move their AI plans into production.

That momentum reaches well beyond the U.S. The institutions we met from Latin America to Asia are at different stages with AI, but for many of them, AI in financial crime compliance is now at the top of next year’s list. Payments companies and insurers shared similar plans, as did consultants and integrators like Kaufman Rossin and Kroll, who help financial institutions adopt new technology. They’re ready to move.

As these plans move forward, the conversation is becoming more practical, and that’s an encouraging sign. Compliance leaders are asking how an agent should handle a case it’s unsure about and how to show a regulator the reasoning behind each decision. Getting those answers right is what gives institutions, and their regulators, confidence in the work.

We’re looking forward to working through those questions with the teams running fraud investigations and financial crime compliance in the year ahead.

See you next year, Vegas

Thank you to everyone who stopped by our booth, joined us for dinner, picked up a copy of The Standard or tried a key on the lockbox. Your curiosity and insights gave us a lot to think about as we head into 2027.

If we didn’t get the chance to meet in Vegas, we’d still like to hear what your team is working on, whether you’re exploring AI for fraud, scaling your financial crime compliance program or just getting started. Reach out to our team, and we hope to see you at Money20/20 next year.