Money20/20: How Fintech Is Turning Trust Into Infrastructure

For a long time, fintech conversations were driven by possibility. What could exist? What might change? What was coming next?

At Money20/20, the tone felt different. Instead of just imagining the future, most conversations focused on how systems are actually designed to absorb the new risks that come with innovation. 

Walking the floor, it was hard to miss how often the same concerns came up: fraud that surfaces too late, consent that lives outside core systems, and data that looks clean until it starts moving.

That reality came through clearly in how David Pickard, Phonexa’s CEO, described the limits of traditional fraud tools:

“When I’ve used other fraud tools in the past, they try to make it binary. It’s either fraud or it’s not fraud. And that’s just not how it works. It’s kind of a moving scale, and that scale is bespoke to each industry, bespoke to each advertiser that’s looking to facilitate a particular product.”

That context shaped how Phonexa showed up at the event, introducing ValidRecord, the compliance and data integrity platform designed to address those gaps directly, by bringing iClaim and iClear into the core of lead and call acquisition.

Where Acquisition Puts Trust to the Test

Especially in financial services, leads and calls are regulated touchpoints. They carry consent, risk, and accountability from the very first interaction. How they’re captured, verified, routed, and documented is really a structural requirement.

Because intent is first captured at the point of entry, it’s also where trust is first put at risk. Many teams still operate with validation that happens too late to prevent waste, consent records detached from the acquisition flow, and fraud that only becomes visible after outcomes are already set.

This is where the distinction between compliance and data integrity becomes practical.

How ValidRecord Responds to the Gap

As a platform, ValidRecord is built to operate at the point of entry, where compliance and data integrity matter most.

iClaim addresses the compliance side by recording how consent is captured. It creates a screen-level record of the form fill at the moment a lead is generated and stores that record inside the platform, making it available later for audits, disputes, or regulatory review.

iClear operates on the data side. Built to be flexible by use case but data-first by design, it validates identity and contact signals and returns them in a clean, usable format — allowing teams to act on risk indicators early, rather than debating them after the fact.

Together, they reflect a wider industry response: treating verification, consent, and compliance as core infrastructure.

What’s Already in Motion

What’s emerging across fintech now is a shared understanding: sustainable growth depends less on bold promises and more on structures that can support trust, speed, and accountability over time.

To see how this conversation translated into real presence—and the launch of ValidRecord—watch highlights from Phonexa’s time in Las Vegas in the recap video below: