Get ready with me for Money20/20 Europe: event marketing for people who like to prepare
By Alexandra Newlove, Associate Director, Aspectus Group
Earlier in my career, when I was a journalist, conferences required relatively little strategy from me. I would turn up with a pass, a half-charged phone, a notebook, and the serenity of someone whose meetings had mostly been arranged by other people.
Journalism is also a job where you never have to explain yourself – or your proposition – over pastries. Moving into communications has changed that. When you are representing a business, a client or a commercial point of view, a good event does not just happen because you are in the room. It has to be planned.
That does not mean treating conferences as a grim endurance test. Money20/20 Europe is one of the best places to hear smart people talk about where financial technology is heading. But it’s also big, busy and overstimulating.
So, with a few days to go, here’s my “get ready with me” guide to making the most of your PR and marketing effort for Amsterdam — especially if your natural habitat is less working the room and more highlighting the agenda and muttering “interesting” to yourself.
Do the reading before you arrive
Money20/20 Europe 2026 runs from 2–4 June at the RAI in Amsterdam, with the agenda built around four big content pillars: AI and the Agentic Age, The Great Rebundling, Money Stack Rewired, and Regulation in the Fast Lane.
That agenda is not just a scheduling tool, but a useful map of what the market thinks matters.
This year, the program points to some of the biggest live debates in fintech: agentic AI, stablecoins, cross-border payments, regulation, fraud, embedded finance, and the convergence of traditional finance and decentralized finance. There is also The Intersection, a dedicated space for conversations between TradFi and DeFi, covering areas like stablecoin architecture, tokenized banking, public blockchains and whether stablecoins are revolutionary or just well-funded rhetoric.
The point is not to attend everything, but to use the agenda to sharpen your own thinking. Before you arrive, pick the sessions that are most relevant to your business, your buyers and your story. Then work out what those sessions tell you about the problems your audience is trying to solve.
Be realistic about where you sit in the market
This is where fintech brands often make life unnecessarily hard for themselves. They arrive with one catch-all description and hope it will do the job. Usually it contains the word “platform”. Sometimes it contains the word “seamless”. In severe cases, it contains both.
But your company being interesting to you and your colleagues does not automatically make it interesting to anyone else.
This is particularly true if you are a smaller or less well-known company. That is not a moral failing. Most companies are not Revolut or JP Morgan, and most journalists are not sitting at their desks wondering why nobody has briefed them on your Q2 product roadmap.
It just means you have to work harder.
A useful story usually connects to something bigger than the company itself: a regulatory development, a customer problem, fresh data, a contrarian view, an unusual founder story, or a clear explanation of a trend everyone is trying to understand. The content in your sales deck is probably not a marketing story yet.
This is where it is worth seeking help and asking for harsh feedback. Not “does this sound good?” but “would anyone outside this business care?” and “can I explain this in plain English without using the words ecosystem, solutions, seamless, next-generation or unlock?”
It is better to find out the answer before you are standing in front of a prospect or journalist with 12 minutes between meetings and the haunted expression of someone who has already been pitched six AI-powered payment orchestration platforms before 11am.
Know what type of journalist you’re speaking to
Trade media and top-tier media do different jobs – and understanding the difference will make you better at speaking to both.
Trade journalists are usually writing for people who already understand the market. That means they can often go deeper into aspects like product detail, implementation challenges, and technical shifts.
National or top tier journalists, meanwhile, are working with broader audiences, meaning every story must travel further. It needs a wider public interest hook – maybe around consumers, competition, geopolitics, or power.
The mistake is taking one version of the story and forcing it everywhere. For trade media, you might say: “This new infrastructure reduces settlement friction for cross-border payments providers.” For top-tier media, that may need to become: “This is part of a bigger shift in how money moves around the world, affecting the cost, speed and security of payments for businesses and consumers.”
Neither is better. A thoughtful piece in a respected trade title can be far more commercially valuable than a passing mention in a national outlet read by millions of people who will never need, buy or understand what you do.
A good journalist conversation at Money20/20 is also not a one-way download of your company narrative. You could also ask them what themes they are tracking, what feels overhyped, and what they are bored of hearing. Do not monopolize their time, do not tell them what they “should” be writing about, and — this should go without saying, but experience suggests otherwise — do not make jokes about journalists being lazy, stupid, biased or out to get people.
Apart from being rude, it is a spectacularly poor way to build a relationship with someone whose job is to decide whether you are worth listening to.
Turn conversations into campaign fuel
Content marketing and brand building are a big part of why many of us invest in events like this. But there will be a lot of LinkedIn content from Amsterdam. Some of it will be useful. Some of it will be a blurry photo of a stage with the caption “great insights from an excellent panel”.
A better approach is to capture what you are actually learning. Listen for the language people are using. Notice which topics are everywhere, which ones feel overclaimed, and which companies can explain themselves in one sentence. Ask a few consistent questions in meetings so you can spot patterns rather than relying on whatever happens to be loudest.
You do not need to publish a whitepaper from the show floor. Nobody needs that from you, and you need your lunch. But you can gather evidence for a really cracking post-event blog, a trends note, a LinkedIn series, a media angle, or a sharper point of view for your team.
Make the event earn its place in the marketing plan
I am obviously biased, but Marketing Thursday looks worth paying attention to. Money20/20 describes it as a day focused on the strategies, storytelling and growth engines behind successful fintech brands.
That matters because fintech is no longer just a technology race – it is increasingly a clarity race.
There are a lot of good companies with complicated stories using near-baffling terminology to describe themselves. Money20/20 is a useful stress test. Can people understand what you do quickly? Do they remember it later? Can they repeat it to someone else? Does your story connect to a real market conversation, or does it live entirely inside your sales deck?
If the answer is uncomfortable, that is not a disaster. It is useful information.
At Aspectus, we spend a lot of time helping complex financial services and fintech businesses turn technical propositions into stories people actually want to engage with — across PR, media relations, social, content, messaging and digital campaigns. We will be at Money20/20 Europe. If you’re thinking about how to make your brand more visible — before, during or after the show — we’d love to compare notes.
Key takeaways
How can fintech brands prepare properly for Money20/20 Europe?
Use the agenda strategically, identify the sessions most relevant to your audience, and refine your messaging before arriving so you can speak clearly about the problems your business solves.
How can fintech firms tailor their messaging for different media?
Understand your audience. The same story will not resonate equally across every publication. Trade media often want depth and implementation insight, while national media need accessible narratives tied to bigger societal or economic trends.
How can businesses turn conference conversations into marketing value?
Capture recurring themes, questions and insights from meetings to fuel post-event content, sharper positioning, media opportunities and future campaigns.
About the author
Alexandra works with our financial services clients creating campaigns that are frank, honest, and engaging. She is interested in making investing an integral part of life for many, not just a privileged few. Since joining Aspectus in 2021, Alexandra has drawn on her background as a journalist and editor, where she covered wealth and investment management. She is one of our media trainers and brings a journalist’s knack for tackling complex topics in an accessible way, always with an eye on ‘what’s next’ in the news. Alexandra also serves as a volunteer non-executive director for an organization promoting financial inclusion and is a governor for a school in South London.
