What’s Fueling Fintech’s Next Hype Cycle, with Sam Boboev

AI-driven matchmaking is doing more work than the panels: #

Sam Boboev, founder of Fintech Wrap Up, catches up with Igor Tomych right after moderating a panel at the inaugural Fintech Meetup Europe in Lisbon. His standout observation about the event itself: roughly a third of it is built around AI-matched one-to-one meetings rather than passive panel-watching; he counted about eight in three days, calling them uniformly productive, a format borrowed directly from the event’s US edition.

The panel question that matters: can AI’s savings reach the customer: #

Boboev’s own panel pushed past generic AI-in-payments talk to ask something sharper: is AI just cutting operational costs, or can banks and merchants pass some of those savings back to customers as better pricing and loyalty? Panelists from a fraud-focused AI vendor and Deutsche Bank’s merchant solutions team gave him concrete ground to stand on, moderating for the first time in a career otherwise spent podcasting.

The Qivalis euro stablecoin timeline, from someone who just asked its CEO: #

A one-to-one with Qivalis’s CEO at the event gave Boboev a direct, current read: the 37-bank European consortium still plans to launch its euro-pegged stablecoin in early 2027. Both hosts are candid about where the euro stands against dollar stablecoins today, “so far, we are losing,” framing it as this year’s unresolved race rather than a settled story.

Agentic commerce’s real blocker isn’t trust; it’s liability: #

AI in payments has spent 2026 moving from internal back-office use toward customer-facing agentic commerce, but Boboev argues the whole category is stalled on one unanswered question: who’s liable when an AI agent makes a mistake with a user’s money. Tomych sharpens the point: “you’re basically allowing Anthropic or OpenAI to do the stuff on your behalf with your money, but you will be blamed for that”, framing liability, not capability, as the real gate agentic commerce has yet to pass through.

Why Amazon blocked Meta’s Muse, and what it previews: #

The conversation closes on Amazon blocking Meta’s Muse shopping agent, days after a separate court fight between Amazon and Perplexity’s Comet agent. Boboev’s read goes beyond platform safety: Amazon already runs its own AI and advertising business, and letting a competitor’s agent harvest shopping data on its site threatens both. It’s a preview, the hosts agree, of how agentic commerce will actually get gated, by marketplaces deciding unilaterally which AI agents get access, not by regulators.

Why listen: #

For anyone tracking whether agentic commerce is close to real adoption, this episode is a fast, on-the-ground read from two people who spent the week talking to the banks and vendors building it, and a clear-eyed case for why liability, not technology, is the blocker still standing in the way.