PCM Vol.3 Issue 11

P20 Inaugural Conference in London
Following more than 18 months of preparation and
anticipation, top leaders, government officials, and
regulators in the payments industry gathered at Lancaster
House in central London for the inaugural P20 summit.
The conference featured some of the top CEOs and
innovative thinkers in the payments industry and financial
technology, who traveled from across the globe to
meet and discuss key issues and challenges facing the
payment industry.
The program, moderated by Al Lukies CBE, the Prime
Minister’s Global Ambassador to Fintech, included several
panels featuring top experts in the FinTech and payments
space. Two headline keynote speakers included former
U.S. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, and Stephen Barclay,
MP with UK Treasury oversight.
“It’s very significant,” said H. West Richards of the
American Transaction Processors Coalition. “(The P20
summit is) bringing the leaders of the industry together
with regulators from the United Kingdom and the United
States, which truly are the leading regulators and thought
leaders around regulation when it comes to the financial
services industry, and payments in particular.”
Richards, with Robert Green of the Holland & Knight law
firm in Atlanta, first conceived of the P20 concept — short
for Payments 20 — in early 2016. Along with long-time
financial executive Peter Radcliffe, based in London, they
began pulling together a who’s-who list of participants
for the first-ever P20 summit.
“Bringing everyone together to help shape the future
of the payments industry is a pretty big mission,” said
Richards.
“I’ve been talking to a huge number of people, and the
need and desire to get together here in London has been
tremendous,” said Radcliffe.
Prior to the gathering, Green, Richards and Radcliffe
worked to establish a series of pillars that define the
mission of the P20 in London, and in years to come. Those
pillars are focused on financial challenges impacting
everyone: regulation, cyber security, financial technology
(FinTech) innovation and financial inclusion.
“I’ve talked to many CEOs, and as you can imagine, the
one thing they say always concerns them is cyber risk,”
said Radcliffe. “All you can do is actually make as certain
as possible you are spending the right amount of money
to defend the data that you have, but also the protection
of the system.”
“The way we tackle this is by cooperation, and sitting
around that table, every member of the P20 board has that
absolutely in the top of their mind. There is no competitive
issue in protecting our industry against cyber-attack.”
While cyber security is on the minds of seemingly
everyone, financial inclusion is the key phrase being
focused on by many executives and innovators.
“It (financial inclusion) is important to growth, it’s
important to commerce, it’s important to minimizing the
disparity economically in the world,” said Allen Maines,
Executive Partner at Holland & Knight in Atlanta.
“There are a number of places in the world where
economic disparity is growing, and that has predictably
resulted in higher crime and more unrest, more political
instability. The more we can level the playing field and
make electronic payments available to people, the more
stable the world is going to be,” said Maines.
With these issues helping to define the inaugural P20,
members and invitees gathered at Lancaster House on
October 10, 2017, focusing not only on the event, but on
the summit to come one year later in Atlanta, GA.
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