INPUT Global, a communications agency that works with emerging-tech founders, ran its full-day (un)Banked conference on June 3 at Amsterdam's Fosbury & Sons club, a Money20/20 Europe side event that drew senior leaders from banking, payments, venture capital, and asset management. The event turned on the word in its own name. "Unbanked" has always meant left out; the argument running through the day was that, onchain, it now describes a head start.
The (un)Banked by INPUT Global: How the Unbanked Ended Up Ahead of the Banks
The Banks Are Playing Catch-Up
Oleg Bevz, Co-Founder of INPUT Global, opened the day by putting that inversion on record.
"The unbanked population has often been seen as underprivileged; with blockchain, the same cohort of people moved onchain and now enjoys more efficiency and speed than the traditional rails can offer. So much so that traditional finance is now actively making the change," he said.
It reads as a specific claim, not a slogan: the people conventional finance never reached built on newer infrastructure, and that infrastructure now outperforms the incumbents on the metrics users feel.
Bevz framed the point from his own vantage – "As a communications agency that has been working with emerging tech founders and startups for the last five years, I have seen this shift happen first-hand" – which set the tone for a program built around operators describing what they are already shipping.
Rules, Rails and the User
If the unbanked got ahead on infrastructure, the harder question at (un)Banked was what has to be in place for institutions to follow them. Laurent Marochini, CEO of Standard Chartered Luxembourg, started with the rulebook.
"Europe has established the global benchmark for digital asset regulation, providing the strong foundation needed for the industry to grow and for a wide range of stablecoin use cases to come to the European market," he said, crediting the region's framework as the precondition for everything downstream. He was equally direct about what still slows the incumbents: "the fear of change remains one of the key challenges facing the sector."
Konstantins Vasilenko, Co-Founder of Paybis, the conference's title sponsor, described the layer that turns regulatory clarity into something a bank can actually use.
"At Paybis, we help banks, brokers, EMIs, and neobanks gain compliant access to digital assets. We have addressed the infrastructure, licensing, and liquidity challenges, making it operationally feasible for financial institutions to enter the market," he said.
He located the strongest demand in unglamorous, high-volume places: merchant settlement in stablecoins, giving business customers direct access to stablecoins, and business accounts that convert between fiat and crypto without friction.
Daniel Rowlands, General Manager at Wirex, took the argument to the end user, where he expects the technology to disappear from view entirely.
"The winners in the evolving payments landscape will be those that deliver the most effective and compliant form of digital money. Ultimately, consumers are less concerned with the underlying technology and more focused on solutions that are fast, cost-effective, and seamless to use. Whether powered by stablecoins or other innovations, the future of global finance will be defined by technologies that make moving money easier, more accessible, and more efficient," he said.
Read alongside Marochini and Vasilenko, it sketches a full stack: rules at the top, rails in the middle, and a consumer who never has to know either exists.
Where the Real Money Went
What that convergence looks like from inside a single company came through in a conversation between Daniele Casamassima, CEO of Pure Wallet App, and Euronews Romania journalist Ioana Nicolescu. Casamassima used his own company's trajectory as the evidence.
"While we started as a crypto wallet, our vision has always been much broader. Today, Pure Wallet App operates as a comprehensive neobank, providing access to more than 3,000 investment instruments across equities, ETFs, commodities, and digital assets. Leveraging our portfolio management licence, we can also offer strategic investment guidance, helping customers build diversified portfolios and achieve their long-term financial goals," he said – a crypto-native product that has become a full-service financial firm.
Rob Hadick, General Partner at Dragonfly, gave the capital-side reading, and he did not hedge it.
"We've always invested in stablecoins, tokenization, and institutional adoption. What's changed is that these themes are now the most prominent in the industry, and our cheque sizes, ownership and conviction have only grown with them. The market is splitting in two: a retail segment whose speculative activity is contracting, and an institutional segment expanding rapidly as real capital comes on-chain and the benefits of adoption are becoming clearer," he said.
In his telling, the split resolves into a single destination: "Crypto, tokenized assets, and traditional capital markets are collapsing into a single financial system. The largest institutions now treat this as core infrastructure, not just an experiment."
That was the throughline INPUT Global was after: the point where crypto and traditional finance stop being two separate things. Paybis anchored the roster as title sponsor, with Foresight Ventures and Pure Wallet App as category sponsors and Swiss-regulated The Vault as community sponsor. The (un)Banked runs next on the sidelines of Digital Asset Summit London in November and Abu Dhabi Finance Week in December. On the evidence from Amsterdam, the merger of the two systems is no longer the thing in doubt – the open question is how fast it finishes.
