Luka Sučić, Money Motion | "More things shifted in the last eight months than in the last eight years"

How did Money Motion 2026 change compared to the 2025 edition?

This being our fourth year is kind of special. The first three years are usually used to solidify, and the fourth is where you need to reinvent yourself. Honestly, to me, it feels like a completely different event. Not because of what we built, but because everything we have been warning about since the first edition became true. More things shifted in the last eight months than in the last eight years.

Everything we thought was hardcoded, the payment rails, the regulatory assumptions, the geopolitical frameworks, the role of the dollar, the way banks think about technology, was reset completely.

The ground moves, and it's not supposed to do that. When the ground moves, a conference either becomes more relevant or less relevant. For Money Motion, it became more relevant. The conversations on the floor grew more serious, the agenda became sharper, and the people showing up stopped coming to learn and started coming to figure out what to do next. Money Motion is no longer a promising regional conference - it became the place where actual decisions get made about what comes next.

Acquisition of Automation Summit and regional expansion

At Money Motion you expanded by acquiring Automation Summit and you will develop regional smaller events - tell me more about Money Motion plans and what is the end goal for you?

Not only did we acquire Automation Summit, but we have a few new surprises in the same direction. One thing that people don't seem to understand (especially our competitors) is that we are not building a conference business. We're building the dominant fintech platform in Europe, and we're using every playbook that the best startups and crypto projects use to scale fast, aggressive expansion, network effects, aggressively nurturing the community, and the kind of growth that makes people uncomfortable when they hear the timeline.

The acquisition of Automation Summit wasn't about adding an event to a portfolio. It was about owning the AI and automation conversation in this region before someone else does. That vertical is where the enterprise budget is flowing right now, and we want to be the place where those decisions happen, not just in fintech but across every industry being rebuilt by automation.

Money Motion Talks is our distribution layer. One-day format, lighter to produce, travels to Belgrade, Vienna, Bucharest, Sarajevo, Milano we're planting flags in every major market in CEE and SEE and building community before we need it. That's the crypto playbook. You don't wait, you build the audience first.

The core event grows. The satellite events create a pipeline. The Automation Summit becomes its own thing. And suddenly you have a network of communities, brands, and touchpoints across the region that no single competitor can replicate quickly. The goal isn't to be the biggest conference in Croatia. It's to be the fintech infrastructure of Europe, the place where the ecosystem connects, where the narrative gets set, where the deals happen. We want to become what the largest events in the world took decades to build, and we want to get there in a fraction of the time. That's the ambition.

300 applications and 15 startups selected on stage

Give me some stats for the startup competition at Money Motion for this year. And for a conference like Money Motion why is it important to have a stage dedicated to startups?

What I can tell you is the competition consistently brings in applications from across the CEE region, with fintech, payments, insurtech, and now AI-native financial tools dominating the categories. More than 300 applications, 15 selected to present on stage.

Why do startups need their own stage? Simple, every single company on our main stage was once a startup. The established players come to Money Motion to understand where the market is going. And where the market is going is always being built in a garage somewhere right now. If you only put banks and payment processors on stage, you get a retrospective. You put startups up there and suddenly the whole room is leaning forward. The startup stage is where you see the next five years before anyone else does. And for the startups themselves, getting in front of 3000 decision-makers, investors, and potential partners in a single day, that's a full year of cold outreach compressed into one pitch. The ROI is insane if you're the right company at the right stage.

The era of "we'll build you a custom integration and hope you adopt it" is absolutely over. What's also over is startups pitching features. But essential products that customers absolutely love and use? Adjacent to banks core value proposition, no bank is going to resist that. I don't see any of the big corporations behaving like a startup. And that comes from a decade of experience.

AI is moving from assistant to actual operator

3 key trends you believe will impact 2026 in the fintech ecosystem?

First one is stablecoins becoming a real payment infrastructure, not a crypto narrative anymore. When banks start issuing their own, the entire cross-border payment stack gets rebuilt from scratch. The question isn't whether it happens; the question is who ends up owning the new rails.

Second is AI moving from assistant to actual operator. Not AI helping your compliance team, AI being your compliance team, doing the underwriting, running the fraud detection. The productivity gap between institutions that deploy this properly and those that don't is going to be genuinely brutal for the slow movers.

Third is something most fintech people are still not pricing in, which is the dollar's role in global settlement getting seriously tested. Not collapsing, tested. And that test reshapes how every company touching cross-border payments thinks about its core assumptions. The ones building for a multipolar currency world right now will look very smart in about 36 months.

Regulate clearly, not more or less

European regulation was often criticized for hurting innovation. Right now voices are raising that this is the competitive advantage of Europe in fields such as cybersecurity, banking, insuretech, healthtech, where regulation is mandatory. How do you see the right recipe for Europe as a global innovator?

The problem with this debate is that both sides are right and talking across each other. GDPR, PSD2, and MiCA created real compliance costs that slowed things down immensely. That's true. But they also created a trust infrastructure that the US and Asia don't have, and in verticals like cybersecurity, banking, health, and especially fintech, trust is the product. And in the coming years, this is going to be more evident than ever.

The recipe isn't "regulate more" or "regulate less." It's "regulate clearly."

Regulation has been weaponized for hundreds of years to protect the monopolies. In virtually every industry known to man. The disaster scenario isn't a strict regulation; it's an uncertain and intentionally malicious regulation. When a startup doesn't know what the rules will be in 18 months, they build conservatively or they leave and switch for a more favourable jurisdiction. When the rules are clear, even if they're demanding smart teams build for compliance from day one and that becomes a moat.

The real recipe, in my honest opinion, is that Europe needs to couple strong regulatory frameworks with faster procurement and adoption by public institutions. The regulation creates the standards. The public sector needs to then actually buy from the companies meeting those standards instead of defaulting to American tech.

Agentic AI is one of the key trends mentioned in different verticals - what are the challenges for this in a highly regulated European space and also respecting the governance of the institutions?

Oh, this one is a hard nut to crack; it's like the early days of crypto, and I don't think European space is ready for that. Agentic AI is designed to act with autonomous will, and European financial regulation is built around human accountability and this will be a very hard clash very, very soon.

Every credit decision, every transaction flag, every compliance call, there is somewhere in the legal framework a requirement that a human being is responsible for that outcome. Agentic AI breaks that assumption not at the edges but at the very core of how these systems are architected. And most institutions haven't even begun to understand the implications of that yet.

So you end up with three problems that all need solving at the same time, and you can't really sequence them.

First is explainability, you cannot have an AI agent executing a treasury operation and then not be able to reconstruct for a regulator exactly why it made that specific decision in that specific moment.

Second is liability, which honestly nobody wants to talk about but it's the most important one. When an agentic system makes a mistake, and it will, who is legally on the hook? The vendor who built the model. The institution that deployed it. The person who approved the pilot. This is not settled law anywhere in Europe right now, and that ambiguity alone will slow adoption significantly.

Third is the governance infrastructure inside the institutions themselves; most banks' internal controls, approval chains, and oversight structures were literally designed for human actors. You plug in an autonomous agent, and you break these things quietly, in ways you often don't discover until something already went wrong. At the same time, those who build actually useful agents are shown to grow at a shocking pace, 3-5x faster than anything seen before. They will become bigger, faster, and will be much harder to deal with