Amsterdam encore: Future Finance Fest the day after Money20/20
June 02, 2026
By Joe Pan
Future Finance Fest Returns to Amsterdam After Money20/20 Europe
Future Finance Fest (3F) will land in Amsterdam on June 5, just one day after Money20/20 Europe, with a proposition that sounds almost suspiciously efficient by fintech-conference standards: short, evidence-heavy presentations from people building, regulating and studying the future of finance. The event, known as 3f, is set for the nhow Amsterdam RAI hotel near the RAI convention complex and is built to bring digital finance leaders and finance scholars into the same room to accelerate what organizers describe as responsible financial innovation.
Bridging Academia and Industry in Digital Finance
For Money 20/20 EU attendees and those who miss the main Money conference, that pitch is more than calendar filler. This is where payment infrastructure, policy and deep-learning-era analytics are increasingly meeting in public, and where the gap between glossy product narrative and hard institutional reality gets tested. Blockwind News, a media partner to the conference, will be covering the arguments, ideas and market signals emerging from the sessions and side conversations.
The conference is also building on a real first chapter, not a vaporware origin myth. The inaugural Future Finance Fest took place in Vilnius, Lithuania, Aug. 25 27, 2025. The conference’s intellectual architect is David Stolin, a professor of finance at TBS Education in Toulouse, France. His research spans investment management, corporate governance, fintech and text analytics, which helps explain why 3f is not trying to choose between academic seriousness and market relevance.
“Fintechs don’t go to academic conferences, and scholars don’t go to fintech ones. The whole point of 3f is to bring the two worlds together [for deeper learning and exchange,” Stolin said. “Future Finance Fest is designed to close that gap, so practitioners can test ideas against evidence and researchers can test theory against the demands of real markets.”
The conference is being organized in collaboration with the Cambridge Centre for Finance, Technology and Regulation and Holland Fintech Association among a number of industry power houses, reinforcing its ambition to sit at the intersection of industry and scholarship. Eliot Qinyizhou, the co-organizer helping shape the Amsterdam edition, is positioning the event around speed, clarity and cross-border range rather than marathon panels and padded talking points.
“We built the program around 15 minute presentation windows because we wanted every session to be focused, concrete and useful. ” Qin said. “In a short format, speakers need to show what is changing, why it matters now, and what the evidence says across different markets. The goal is not to fill time with broad panels, but to create a sharper exchange between researchers, practitioners and policy-facing institutions.”
That format may be 3f’s most underrated feature. According to event descriptions and partner materials, the conference is designed so fintech companies gain access to rigorous academic critique and potential research collaborators, while scholars gain practitioner feedback, proprietary market insight and direct exposure to institutions shaping digital finance. In plain English: less conference cardio, more signal.
Three talks on the Amsterdam agenda stand out as a strong snapshot of global payments demand.
- Sofi Hakanson of Sweden-based Centiglobe will present “From Traditional Infrastructure to Collaborative Networks: Cross-Border Payments with Tokenized Deposits,” scheduled for 11:10 a.m. in the Vanilla room. The session examines how tokenized payments can deliver speed and efficiency while staying inside existing regulatory frameworks, using network-based tokenized deposits that allow regulated banks and payment institutions to transact directly while supporting G20 goals on cost, transparency and settlement speed.
- Sabine Schaller of the Interledger Foundation will present “From Remittances to Resilience: Interoperable Payments for Rural Inclusion in Latin America” at 11:30 a.m., also in Vanilla. Her talk reframes remittances not as isolated private transfers but as crucial local infrastructure, arguing that interoperable payment systems in Mexico and the wider region can connect cross-border flows to domestic financial ecosystems, strengthen rural inclusion and support competition at scale.
- Jeremy Sulzbacher of Belgium’s Safe Transactions bv will present “Multilateral Bank Customer Profiling & Pretesting of Payments” at 3:20 p.m. in Vanilla. The proposal introduces an AI-augmented monitoring platform that combines behavioral history with payment “pretesting” data before formal submission to banks, aiming to improve anomaly detection, identify both true and false positives, and strengthen the integrity of global remittance and payment-security networks.
Seen together, those three sessions tell a broader story about where the market is heading. Europe is grappling with tokenized bank-connected payment rails, Latin America is pushing interoperable remittance infrastructure that serves real communities beyond urban fintech demos, and Belgium offers a window into how AI is being applied to fraud prevention and payment monitoring before funds even move. That is not just a geographic spread; it is a map of current demand.
The Amsterdam Event’s Strategic Timing and Impact
Amsterdam gives 3f both symbolic weight and practical momentum. The city is one of Europe’s historic financial centers, and the conference’s placement immediately after Money20/20 Europe gives it a built-in audience of executives, founders, regulators and journalists already in town for the industry’s largest gathering. That timing also sharpens the contrast: where Money20/20 specializes in scale and spectacle, 3f is staking its claim on concentrated substance, bringing the fintech crowd into direct conversation with the scholars and practitioners who, as David Stolin argued in his Nordic Fintech Magazine essay, can help “turbocharge” startups and institutions when research and market execution are allowed to collide productively.
If last year’s Vilnius debut proved there is real demand for that model, Amsterdam is where 3f tries to turn a strong first impression into durable momentum. The inaugural edition drew praise for bringing together academics, founders and senior finance professionals in a way that set “a new standard” for how rigor and innovation can converge, and this year’s more accessible Amsterdam location is intended to widen that reach even further. Limited seats are still available, and registration remains open at 3f.live.
About the Author
Joe Pan is an editor and producer at Blockwind News. An early adopter of blockchain technology, he has covered major crypto conferences globally since 2019 and moderated Web3 events across Asia. Joe is part of the founding team of Blockwind News and teaches Asia’s first Master of Journalism course on “Covering Cryptocurrency and Blockchain” at Hong Kong Baptist University.
