Meet Eleftherios "Jerry" Floros — author, keynote speaker, and one of the more independent voices in the current AI debate. Jerry is a contributing author of the bestselling FINTECH Book Series published by Wiley — The WealthTech Book, The PayTech Book, The LegalTech Book, and The AI Book — and is currently writing his third solo book, AI Sucker Punch: It's Going To Hit You Harder and Faster and Sooner Than You Think.

He is a lecturer at the FinTech Circle Institute, and a member of the British Blockchain Association, Crypto Valley Association, Global Tech Advocates, Tech London Advocates, and the Institute of Directors. Across more than three decades in finance, engineering, and maritime industries — and now sitting at the intersection of AI, blockchain, and financial technology — Jerry has become one of the most-followed independent commentators on where AI is actually heading, and one of the few willing to push back on both the abundance narrative and the doom narrative in equal measure.

In this episode, Jerry walks through the economics of AI (why for every $1 OpenAI and Anthropic take in, they spend roughly $1.50 producing it), the bubble that is now forming and the bust that follows, the concentration of power around a handful of billionaires deciding the future for 8 billion people, the physical constraints (energy, water, cooling) that half of new data centre projects have already run into, Europe's move toward sovereign AI, the MAD-style regulatory framework that Jerry argues we now urgently need, and the human cost that is already visible in tech layoffs and student job prospects.

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Timestamps:

01:20 – What is AI, actually? Jerry's working definition

02:30 – The data problem: cameras on foreheads, synthetic data, and 80% of code written by AI

04:30 – IQ scaling: models at 114–150 now, and where this goes

05:30 – The bandwidth bottleneck: humans can't keep up with the tokens per second

06:00 – What AI should be used for: nuclear fusion, AlphaFold, Alzheimer's, cancer

08:25 – Defining "humane tech" and what it means in practice

09:00 – 8 billionaires deciding the fate of 8 billion people

10:00 – DeepMind and AlphaFold: the open-sourced Nobel Prize

12:00 – The AI realist position: neither abundance nor doom

13:30 – Will capitalism cap the data centres?

18:00 – The bubble, the bust, and who survives

20:00 – Why we need MAD-style AI regulation

22:00 – Europe's move toward sovereign AI

24:00 – The Anthropic responsible-scaling moment

25:00 – The generational close: what future are we giving our children?

27:00 – The 142,000 tech layoffs and the mental wellbeing crisis

The Fintech Garden is hosted by Igor Tomych, founder and CEO of DashDevs, and Dumitru Condrea, founder of Novafin. All conversations revolve around the world of fintech, movers and shakers, and how decisions are made. Make sure to tune in to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to how the world of finance is evolving before our eyes.

Follow us: https://fintech.gardenCheck out DashDevs: https://dashdevs.comCheck out Novafin: https://novafin.co/

Connect with our hostsIgor Tomych https://www.linkedin.com/in/igortomych/Dumitru Condrea https://www.linkedin.com/in/dcondrea/

Meet Kristy Kim, CEO and co-founder of TomoCredit — the San Francisco-based fintech she started in 2018 to solve a problem she lived through herself.

Kristy immigrated from Seoul, South Korea to the United States at age 11. She studied at UC Berkeley, went into investment banking in San Francisco, and — despite doing everything the American dream playbook prescribed — was repeatedly rejected for an apartment, and then for a car loan. Not because she couldn't afford it, but because she had no credit history in a system that only understands borrowing, not saving.

TomoCredit was built to serve the roughly 30 million Americans in the same position. The company has since evolved from a credit card for the credit-invisible into a broader AI-powered financial wellness platform, most recently launching TomoIQ — an AI agent that shifts personal finance from reactive management to proactive guidance. Kristy is a Forbes Finance Council member, a UC Berkeley guest lecturer on entrepreneurship, and one of the more compelling founders in immigrant-focused fintech today.

In this episode, Igor Tomych and Kristy dig into what fintech gets wrong about first-generation Americans, why "cash rich, credit poor" is a positioning statement rather than a diagnosis, how save-first cultures collide with a borrow-first system, and where cash-flow underwriting actually goes over the next three years. Kristy also shares her operational take on the regulatory line between AI-driven coaching and AI-driven decisioning, why the US fragmentation that everyone complains about is actually a gift to startups, and the closing line that has become an internal mantra at TomoCredit: "I don't have to outsmart Jamie Dimon at everything — just at this."

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TomoCredit: Rejected for Credit, So She Built Her Own, with Kristy Kim | FG x Money20/20: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qX-WXEpChS4

Timestamps:

01:00 – Why we're talking about immigrant fintech

03:29 – Why the US credit system is uniquely tough on newcomers

04:04 – The changing customer: cash-rich, credit-poor

06:07 – Cultural context: save-first cultures meet a borrow-first system

06:51 – "Cash rich, credit poor" as product positioning

09:18 – Coming in as an outsider — the mindset that helped

11:56 – AI as coaching, not decisioning: the regulatory line

14:36 – Expat, immigrant, native: three profiles, three different products

16:55 – Why two customers with the same credit score are not the same customer

17:50 – Cash flow underwriting hits the mainstream — no more hard-selling banks

19:53 – The immigrant-focused fintech wave and what changes in the next 2–3 years

22:33 – Fragmented US market vs super-app Korea: which is better for founders?

24:43 – Focus, not scale: the closing takeaway

25:04 – The Jamie Dimon line: specialists beat generalists

The Fintech Garden is hosted by Igor Tomych, founder and CEO of DashDevs, and Dumitru Condrea, founder of Novafin. All conversations revolve around the world of fintech, movers and shakers, and how decisions are made. Make sure to tune in to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to how the world of finance is evolving before our eyes.

Follow us: https://fintech.garden

Check out DashDevs: https://dashdevs.com

Connect with our hosts

Igor Tomych https://www.linkedin.com/in/igortomych/

Dumitru Condrea https://www.linkedin.com/in/dcondrea/

Subscribe to our newsletter: https://fintech.garden

Meet David G.W. Birch — Principal at his advisory firm 15Mb Ltd., Global Ambassador for Consult Hyperion (the secure electronic transactions consultancy he helped co-found nearly 40 years ago), Non-Executive Chairman of Digiseq, Senior Research Fellow at King's College Business School in London, Visiting Professor at the University of Surrey Business School, and Technology Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Financial Innovation.

David is one of the most established commentators on digital money and digital identity globally — author of Identity Is The New Money, Before Babylon Beyond Bitcoin, The Currency Cold War, Digital Money: A Practitioner's Guide, and most recently The Everything Token: How NFTs and Web3 Will Transform the Way We Buy, Sell, and Create.

He has written 100+ columns for The Guardian and has been named one of the top 10 most influential voices in banking by Financial Brand, one of Europe's "Power 50" in digital financial services, and Europe's most influential commentator on emerging payments by Total Payments magazine.

In this episode, David and Igor take a step back from the noise around stablecoins to ask what is actually happening. The conversation opens with a striking historical parallel — England's industrial revolution had stablecoins too, made of copper — and unfolds into the deeper strategic point that most of the industry is missing: BlackRock and the big institutional players are not in stablecoins for the payments. They are in for the 80% cost reduction hiding in the pathfinder to digital assets.

David also walks through why AI, not humans, will likely be the dominant user of stablecoins, why the "next generation financial market infrastructure" the BIS is describing still has a missing digital identity layer, and why — over a longer horizon — money as we know it may simply disappear, replaced by continuous exchange of digital assets.

Subscribe to the Fintech Garden Newsletter 👉 https://fintech.garden

David Birch: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dgwbirch/

Bringing Stablecoins to Everyday Users, with Giovanni Sanna, Kleos | FG x Money20/20: https://youtu.be/3INUxVsjVhg

OpenPayd: Why Stablecoins Won't Beat Fiat — They'll Marry It, with Barry O'Sullivan |FG x Money20/20: https://youtu.be/5nGdUFxP8ZQ

Stablecoins as the New Dollar Hegemony, and Where Europe Fits, with Marieke Flament |FG x Money20/20: https://youtu.be/9xQe_gSEkAM

Timestamps:

01:06 – Historical parallel: England's industrial revolution had stablecoins too

04:07 – The pattern: private tokens → state takeover → the institutions stay

05:53 – The trigger for stablecoins: money that works with new technology

07:45 – Cryptocurrency demand was proxy demand for dollars

08:15 – AI as the dominant future users of stablecoins

10:25 – The AI abstraction layer: users won't care about chains

12:35 – Regulatory fragmentation: US vs UK vs EU

15:41 – AI redefines what interoperability means

18:59 – Why banks were slow on blockchain

19:30 – Swift vs stablecoin: the architectural difference

20:33 – Why BlackRock is really interested...

23:03 – The trust layer vs the execution layer

24:17 – Banks are regulated institutions — cautious for a reason

25:54 – The 5-year view: financial services vanish behind bots

29:38 – What David wants listeners to think about

30:30 – NFTs come back with real utility

The Fintech Garden is hosted by Igor Tomych, founder and CEO of DashDevs, and Dumitru Condrea, founder of Novafin. All conversations revolve around the world of fintech, movers and shakers, and how decisions are made. Make sure to tune in to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to how the world of finance is evolving before our eyes.

Follow us: https://fintech.garden

Check out DashDevs: https://dashdevs.com

Connect with our hosts

Igor Tomych https://www.linkedin.com/in/igortomych/

Dumitru Condrea https://www.linkedin.com/in/dcondrea/

Meet Stavros Psyllos — VP of Enterprise Solutions at OpenPayd, the London-based embedded finance and Banking-as-a-Service infrastructure provider, and Founder and Chairman of the Cyprus Fintech Society. Stavros brings more than 15 years of payments leadership across the European ecosystem, with senior roles at Cryptopay, Ebury, Verv (Novatti Group), and as the founder of Neogate, NeoPay, and NeoGroup.

He has built one of the most active fintech communities in the Mediterranean region from the ground up — starting with a post-COVID drinks invitation that grew from 10 to 50 to 800 LinkedIn members before being formalised into the Cyprus Fintech Society. He has more than 30,000 followers on LinkedIn and is one of the more recognised voices on community-building in European fintech.

In this episode, Igor and Stavros unpack a topic the podcast has not covered before: how fintech ecosystems and communities are actually built, why the traditional association model is broken, and what a data-driven, member-first community looks like in practice. The conversation covers the genesis story of the Cyprus Fintech Society, how vertical committees produce real outcomes, why face-to-face gatherings still matter, and what kind of business cases actually emerge when the right people share a room. Stavros closes with his five-year view on what will drive fintech next — and the answer is not what most of LinkedIn is talking about.

Subscribe to the Fintech Garden Newsletter 👉 https://fintech.garden

OpenPayd: Why Stablecoins Won't Beat Fiat — They'll Marry It, with Barry O'Sullivan |FG x Money20/20: https://youtu.be/5nGdUFxP8ZQ

Timestamps:

00:30 – Defining community: the playground analogy

03:13 – What's broken with traditional fintech associations

05:00 – The data-driven model: ask members what they want

07:30 – Vertical committees and member-driven initiatives

10:20 – AI in the community: committee-driven, not top-down

14:30 – Why face-to-face bonds still produce business outcomes

18:30 – The five-year driver question

19:09 – Differentiate. Don't chase AI. Focus on compliance, blockchain, stablecoins

22:00 – Why most people focus on the wrong aspects of technology

22:30 – Closing: community as expertise, not marketing

The Fintech Garden is hosted by Igor Tomych, founder and CEO of DashDevs, and Dumitru Condrea, founder of Novafin. All conversations revolve around the world of fintech, movers and shakers, and how decisions are made. Make sure to tune in to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to how the world of finance is evolving before our eyes.

Follow us: https://fintech.garden

Check out DashDevs: https://dashdevs.com

Connect with our hosts

Igor Tomych https://www.linkedin.com/in/igortomych/

Dumitru Condrea https://www.linkedin.com/in/dcondrea/

Subscribe to our newsletter: https://fintech.garden

Meet Dr. Samer Soliman, Group CEO of Arab Financial Services (AFS) — Bahrain's largest digital payments and fintech enabler, regulated by the Central Bank of Bahrain, owned by 37 banks and financial institutions, and serving more than 70 clients across over 20 countries in the Middle East and Africa.

He joined AFS as CEO in January 2021 after serving as Managing Director for the Middle East at Network International. He brings more than 25 years of international experience across banking and payments, and currently sits on the boards of Diners Club Egypt and Levant, AUB Acquiring, and the advisory board of UnionPay International, representing the Middle East.

In this episode, Dr. Samer walks host Igor Tomych through what is actually happening with open banking and open finance across the MENA region — where adoption is driven by the regulator rather than the market, why the UAE Open Finance License is reshaping the competitive landscape, and what the Uber-equivalent moment looks like for financial services.

The conversation covers the three near-term commercial use cases (payment initiation, credit scoring, financial planning), the structural problem of "garbage in, garbage out" in open banking data, the layered infrastructure dominance argument (Google, Apple, Musk/Starlink) applied to financial services, and what the marriage of AI and open finance actually unlocks. Dr. Samer Soliman also shares concrete advice on how fintechs should position themselves relative to incumbents — drawn from his own decision to build AFS's open finance platform now, even before it is profitable.

Subscribe to the Fintech Garden Newsletter 👉 https://fintech.garden

Timestamps:

01:00 – Open finance in MENA — UAE, Bahrain, and the regulator-led model

03:00 – Open finance vs open banking — and why scope matters

05:28 – Three near-term use cases: payment initiation, credit scoring, financial planning

08:20 – Who owns the customer in an open finance world?

10:30 – From custodial bank to financial services vendor

14:30 – Launching the UAE's first digital bank — "my bank" in the early 2000s

17:00 – Resistance from incumbents, and the value of regulator deadlines

20:13 – AI + open finance: when you marry them, "boom"

25:00 – Whoever knows the data first wins: the Bezos / Musk infrastructure layer

27:17 – Closing advice for fintechs: collaborate, don't rebuild from scratch

The Fintech Garden is hosted by Igor Tomych, founder and CEO of DashDevs, and Dumitru Condrea, founder of Novafin. All conversations revolve around the world of fintech, movers and shakers, and how decisions are made. Make sure to tune in to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to how the world of finance is evolving before our eyes.

Follow us: https://fintech.garden

Check out DashDevs: https://dashdevs.com

Connect with our hosts

Igor Tomych https://www.linkedin.com/in/igortomych/

Dumitru Condrea https://www.linkedin.com/in/dcondrea/

Meet Adam McLaughlin, Director of Financial Crime Product at Fenergo and one of the most operationally grounded voices in AML and financial crime today. Adam brings nearly twenty years of experience across law enforcement, banking, and compliance technology.

He spent close to a decade as a UK police detective, including managing a financial crime investigation team at City of London Police — the UK's national lead force for economic crime — and was an operational member of the UK's Joint Money Laundering Intelligence Taskforce (JMLIT). He went on to lead corporate and institutional banking financial crime compliance in EMEA at JP Morgan, then served as Global Director of Financial Crime Strategy at NICE Actimize before joining Fenergo in late 2025 to lead its financial crime product line.

In this episode, host Dumitru Condrea and Adam unpack what has actually changed in AML and financial crime over the last three to four years — and what hasn't. The regulatory frame is moving from "technical compliance" (do you have the systems, are you generating alerts) to "outcome-based" (are you actually stopping crime).Banks are still working through the legacy of siloed KYC systems. Information-sharing legislation is finally moving in Europe, Canada, and the US. Sanctions still matter, but the battleground has shifted to evasion through neutral countries.

AI is genuinely useful — but use-case driven, not a silver bullet. And the honest answer to the question "are the good guys winning?" turns out to be: we're holding the line. Adam's view on what the next decade looks like — shared KYC databases, collaborative monitoring, real-time pattern analysis — closes the conversation.

Subscribe to the Fintech Garden Newsletter 👉 https://fintech.garden

AI agents are changing payment security, with Dr. Ruth Wandhöfer | FG Podcast x MPE 2026: https://youtu.be/8X2D57pAeR4

AI vs Fraud: Inside Device Fingerprinting with Catherine Woneis | Fintech Garden Episode 135: https://youtu.be/TiPQQItHgQk

Timestamps:

01:00 – AML compliance over the last 10–15 years

04:00 – Tick-box compliance to outcome-based regulation (FATF)

06:00 – "Do I understand my customer?" — the foundational question

08:58 – The real gap: data, not technology

12:30 – Do we still need a sanctions list?

17:39 – DNFBPs: the professional services network around organised crime

20:46 – The "Escobar Ltd" anecdote

21:00 – Where is AI overhyped?

23:56 – Crypto: easier and harder to investigate at the same time

24:30 – The travel rule problem with decentralised currency

27:33 – The 10-year vision: collaborative, real-time, expensive (for criminals)

The Fintech Garden is hosted by Igor Tomych, founder and CEO of DashDevs, and Dumitru Condrea, founder of Novafin. All conversations revolve around the world of fintech, movers and shakers, and how decisions are made. Make sure to tune in to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to how the world of finance is evolving before our eyes

Follow us: https://fintech.garden

Check out DashDevs: https://dashdevs.com

Connect with our hosts and the guest:

Igor Tomych https://www.linkedin.com/in/igortomych/

Dumitru Condrea https://www.linkedin.com/in/dcondrea/

Adam McLaughlin https://www.linkedin.com/in/adam-mclaughlin-4a269031/

Meet Theodora Lau — founder of Unconventional Ventures, author of Banking on (Artificial) Intelligence (2025), co-author of The Metaverse Economy (2023) and Beyond Good (2021), and host of the One Vision podcast.

Theo was named one of American Banker's Most Influential Women in FinTech, ranked No. 1 Women in Finance by Onalytica, and is a regular contributor to Forbes, FinTech Futures, BBC News, MIT Tech Review, and Harvard Business Review. Her work focuses on the intersection of financial services, technology, and humanity — particularly inclusion, longevity, and the populations that get left behind when industries restructure.

In this episode, Theo and Igor unpack what the AI-native era actually means for digital banks. The conversation moves from Theo's own "iPhone moment" — buying the first-gen iPhone in 2007 and racking up $300 in roaming charges because she couldn't stop checking the weather app — to the harder, present-tense question: banks built their value around being the institution customers turn to.Today, 53% of US consumers consult AI tools for financial advice, and the entire conversation — user to frontier model — happens without the bank in the loop. What does an AI-native bank actually look like, what should banks do in the next two to three years, and what happens to the people the industry leaves behind?

Episode with Brett King https://youtu.be/L_ghYX-whCg

Customers now have all the tools, with Theodora Lau | FG x Finovate Europe 2026: https://youtu.be/u6EroRKGd1M

Timestamps:

00:42 – Topic framing: digital banks in the AI-native era

04:00 – Intent and context: what banks know vs. what they need to know

06:58 – What banks should do in the next two to three years

09:00 – Data strategy, system updates, and organizational change

13:00 – Trust as guardrails: the highway analogy

13:25 – What does an AI-native bank actually look like?

15:00 – Where AI should not replace humans: wealth, credit, regulator-facing decisions

17:00 – The Wells Fargo phone-call culture and the "do I want to talk to a bot?" debate

19:37 – Why people call credit union call centers and it's not for answers

20:30 – The big shift: banks becoming irrelevant in AI conversations

22:00 – Who owns the new "street"? Apple, Anthropic, OpenAI?

23:32 – 53% of US consumers consult AI for financial advice (JD Power)

25:00 – From SEO to GEO: the wild west of AI-native discovery

27:00 – Who's getting left behind?

28:30 – Layoffs, shareholder value, and the human cost

The Fintech Garden is hosted by Igor Tomych, founder and CEO of DashDevs, and Dumitru Condrea, founder of Novafin. All conversations revolve around the world of fintech, movers and shakers, and how decisions are made. Make sure to tune in to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to how the world of finance is evolving before our eyes.

Follow us: https://fintech.garden

Check out DashDevs: https://dashdevs.com

Connect with our hosts and guest:

Igor Tomych https://www.linkedin.com/in/igortomych/

Dumitru Condrea https://www.linkedin.com/in/dcondrea/

Theodora Lau https://www.linkedin.com/in/theodoralau/

Meet Brett King — futurist, four-time bestselling author of the Bank series (2.0 through 4.0, with Bank 5.0 coming in November), founder of Moven, and host of Breaking Banks, the longest-running and most-listened-to fintech podcast in the world.

Brett was named #1 on Fintech Magazine's Fintech Influencer list this year; Fintech Garden host Igor Tomych came in at #9 on the same list. Brett also co-founded LumaBrush AI, an AI-powered smart toothbrush with an intraoral camera for at-home oral health monitoring, and recently published Branch Today, Gone Tomorrow, a new edition of his thesis on the disappearing bank branch.

In this episode, the conversation looks ten years forward. The challenger bank revolution is largely over — the top 20 retail fintechs now have 4.1 billion customers between them, up 200% in five years, while the top 20 traditional retail banks grew just 3% in the same period. The next shift, Brett argues, is bigger: the banking app itself disappears. The primary interface to financial services becomes a personal AI. Products dissolve into contextual utility. Trust migrates from brand to utility. And by the 2040s, the role of money in its current form starts to decline.

Timestamps:

01:27 – The challenger bank revolution: 4.1B customers and 200% growth

03:51 – Why digital banks won: CAC under $1, UX, and onboarding in minutes

06:48 – The next interface: your personal AI replaces the banking app

10:18 – Will OpenAI inherit the customer relationship from Apple and Google?

12:14 – Bank 1.0 through 5.0: Brett's framework for banking evolution

15:53 – Will we hit human-level AI in the next ten years?

20:42 – The payments future: real-time rails, stablecoins, and CBDCs

24:17 – Why trust has moved from brand to utility

27:30 – Data control as the next foundational layer

28:57 – Bank 5.0 (November) and LumaBrush AI

The Fintech Garden is hosted by Igor Tomych, founder and CEO of DashDevs, and Dumitru Condrea, founder of Novafin. All conversations revolve around the world of fintech, movers and shakers, and how decisions are made. Make sure to tune in to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to how the world of finance is evolving before our eyes.

Follow us: https://fintech.garden

Check out DashDevs: https://dashdevs.com

Connect with our hosts and guest:

Igor Tomych https://www.linkedin.com/in/igortomych/

Dumitru Condrea https://www.linkedin.com/in/dcondrea/

Brett King https://www.linkedin.com/in/brettking/

Meet David Parker, founder and CEO of Polymath Consulting, Lead Ambassador to The Payments Association, co-founder of Konsentus, and one of the most active commentators on UK and global payments.

With 20 years working across cards, e-money, prepaid, and emerging payments — and a reputation for asking the questions employed panelists are not allowed to ask — David brings a sharp, operator-level view of where open banking and recurring payments are actually heading.

In this episode, the focus is on cVRP — Commercial Variable Recurring Payments — the UK scheme designed to compete with both card-on-file and direct debit. David walks through Phase 1 and Phase 2 economics, why utilities and charities are leading adoption, how cVRP's user controls structurally beat card-on-file, the integration reality for merchants, the open debate about which merchants count as "safe," and what's happening globally with Pix, Wero, and the next wave of alternative payments.

CBDC: What you need you know? | Fintech Garden Podcast 155: https://youtu.be/H1MSjbLdlZ4

Why merchant leaders ignore 90% of fintech trends, with David Parker | FG Podcast x MPE 2026: https://youtu.be/XPebDDKS8ys

Timestamps:

01:37 – From promise to performance: where cVRP sits today

06:22 – Push vs pull: why card networks didn't build these controls

07:55 – What merchants gain in Phase 1

13:00 – Customer experience: consent management inside the banking app

15:28 – Why utilities care: AIS pre-checks fix the broken 25% of direct debits

19:15 – Phase 2 and the "who counts as safe" debate

23:00 – Global view: Pix, Wero, and concentration vs fragmentation

24:36 – Why stablecoins remain a B2B story

The Fintech Garden is hosted by Igor Tomych, founder and CEO of DashDevs, and Dumitru Condrea, founder of Novafin. All conversations revolve around the world of fintech, movers and shakers, and how decisions are made. Make sure to tune in to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to how the world of finance is evolving before our eyes.

Follow us: https://fintech.garden

Check out DashDevs: https://dashdevs.com

Connect with our host:

Igor Tomych https://www.linkedin.com/in/igortomych/

Dumitru Condrea https://www.linkedin.com/in/dcondrea/

In this episode of the Fintech Garden Podcast, hosts Igor Tomych and Dumitru Condrea unpack one of the most important — and most misunderstood — shifts coming to European money: Central Bank Digital Currencies.

There is no guest this time. The episode is an explainer designed to give listeners a structured grounding in CBDCs before the topic dominates fintech conversations over the next two to three years.

The conversation starts with a simple framing: €100 can already exist in five different forms — cash, retail bank balance, e-money institution balance, stablecoin, and CBDC — and each one operates under a completely different model of custody, regulation, and trust. From there, the hosts cover the wholesale vs retail CBDC distinction, the geopolitical context driving Europe's response to US stablecoin policy, the digital euro timeline, GDPR's role as Europe's differentiator, the implications for Visa and Mastercard, and the engineering challenge of making CBDC work offline.

Timestamps:

01:06 – The five forms of €100, explained

04:27 – Five countries with live CBDCs, and the wholesale vs retail split

09:32 – The digital euro: timeline, geopolitics, and the US stablecoin pivot

13:00 – Why CBDC could disrupt Visa and Mastercard

17:07 – The hardest question: how CBDC works offline

19:50 – Device-to-device payments, cryptographic signing, and double-spend prevention

22:41 – The Diners Club parallel and what happens during a blackout

The Fintech Garden is hosted by Igor Tomych, founder and CEO of DashDevs, and Dumitru Condrea, founder of Novafin. All conversations revolve around the world of fintech, movers and shakers, and how decisions are made. Make sure to tune in to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to how the world of finance is evolving before our eyes.

Follow us: https://fintech.garden

Check out DashDevs: https://dashdevs.com

Connect with our hosts:

Igor Tomych https://www.linkedin.com/in/igortomych/

Dumitru Condrea https://www.linkedin.com/in/dcondrea/