Inside Money20/20 Europe 2026: The Rise of Agentic Finance and the AI 'Honeybots' Fighting Scams

Day one set the tone with panels on live agentic payment deployments and what it takes to build a $10 billion AI-native fintech valuation . Worldline and ING, for example, announced the completion of a live end-to-end European agentic payment transaction . Day two pivoted to "agentic trust"—the frameworks and infrastructure needed before institutions hand real authority to autonomous financial agents . By day three, the discussion had broadened to include the role of agentic AI in financial inclusion and the convergence of traditional payment rails with digital assets .

Behind the excitement, several speakers warned that onboarding processes and governance models designed for a human-led world are fundamentally static—and a major vulnerability in an agentic future .

Aviel Intelligence wins the pitch competition with AI 'honeybots'

The conference's Start-Up Pitch Competition crowned Aviel Intelligence, a London-based anti-scam intelligence company founded by former Google operators and intelligence experts . Its core technology turns the tables on fraudsters with what it calls "honeybots": fleets of AI-powered synthetic personas that pose as ideal scam victims .

Here is how it works:

1. Aviel continuously scans digital platforms to locate scammer lures.
2. Once a lure is identified, it deploys synthetic personas to engage the scammer in real time, often moving the conversation to encrypted channels like WhatsApp.
3. While the scammer believes they are communicating with a genuine victim, Aviel extracts the financial infrastructure behind the fraud—bank account details, mule accounts, domains, hosting platforms, and phone numbers .
4. That intelligence is fed directly to banks and payment service providers (PSPs) so they can block scam-linked accounts before victims lose money .

The company raised £350,000 in pre-seed funding from Fuel Ventures and was a winner of TSB's 2025 Innovation Labs Fraud Programme . Its pitch win highlights a wider hunger for proactive, intelligence-led fraud defense—a direct response to the UK's so-called "scamdemic" and rising authorized push-payment (APP) fraud losses globally, which reached nearly £500 million in a recent year in the UK alone .

Five more startups that shaped the conversation

Aviel was one of six startups spotlighted through Money20/20's Startup Hub platform . All six were AI-native, treating artificial intelligence as a core differentiator rather than a feature. The complete cohort:

• Fraudio — AI-powered fraud detection and prevention for payments firms.
• Vouchsafe — Digital identity verification and trust infrastructure.
• SoftBees — Low-code and no-code platform for automating financial services.
• SAPI — Open-banking and API-based lending infrastructure.
• Serene — Financial wellness and debt management technology.

Together with Aviel Intelligence, Fraudio and Serene reflect an industry shift toward proactive, AI-driven consumer protection . Meanwhile, Vouchsafe, SoftBees, and SAPI serve the infrastructure layer of embedded finance and digital identity—a direct alignment with the "Great Rebundling" theme running through the conference .

What the cohort tells us about fintech's direction

Beyond the individual companies, the batch of featured startups maps cleanly onto the forces reshaping financial services right now.

• AI-first fraud prevention: Three of the six startups tackle scam detection, APP fraud, or consumer financial harm. The approach is increasingly preemptive: rather than trying to recover money after a crime, the goal is to block the scam infrastructure itself .
• Autonomous agents over assistive tools: The cohort has moved beyond generic "AI integration." These systems take independent action—engaging scammers, blocking suspect payments, or verifying identities—without waiting for human approval .
• Embedded and open finance infrastructure: Vouchsafe, SoftBees, and SAPI supply the pipes for digital identity, low-code financial automation, and API-driven lending. This tracks with the conference's focus on rebundling financial services into seamless, end-to-end experiences .
• Regulatory readiness as a feature: Multiple startups emphasized compliance-by-design, anticipating frameworks such as PSD3 and the EU's AI Act. In a landscape where regulation is moving faster than ever, building compliance into the product from day one is becoming a competitive advantage .

In effect, the startups on stage in Amsterdam were not just pitching products—they were demonstrating what the four conference pillars look like in practice.

The big picture

Money20/20 Europe 2026 confirmed that the agentic era is no longer a concept on a keynote slide; it is already landing in live payment rails, fraud-detection systems, and the business plans of early-stage fintechs. At the same time, the event made clear that trust, identity, and regulation are not afterthoughts—they are the guardrails that will determine whether autonomous finance succeeds or stalls.

For the 7,400 attendees who filled the halls of the RAI, the message was unmistakable: the infrastructure is being laid, the agents are shipping, and the startups building the next layer of defense and intelligence are already taking the stage.