Wrapping up my second year at CV Summit Zurich!
When you're in the room year after year, you stop reading trends and start testing them. Which ambitions announced in year one survived the cycle? Which didn't, and why? Tokenization, stablecoins, AI in operations, regulatory change: each looks different once you can compare what was promised with what shipped.
My two takeaways:
1. The context has shifted.
Through 2024 and 2025, the story was institutional adoption of new products and offering them to retail clients to stay competitive with neobanks, while regulation wasn't fully there yet. Today, adoption is moving fast and the products have matured. The focus has moved from general crypto assets to stablecoins, with much more precision about who benefits most, such as for customers in high-inflation markets, access to digital currency isn't a cool feature, it's a solution to a real problem. FINMA and MiCA requirements have also become clearer and market-tested, which is a definite win.
2. The new topic is Agentic AI.
AI agents making on-chain micropayments on behalf of a person or a company was barely discussed before, and this year it was big on the agenda. The technology is there. The challenge I can't wait to dig into is how Tier-1 institutions enable agents to transact 24/7, 365 on-chain while staying compliant, and how they monitor all of it together with legacy products. We've solved instant settlement with stablecoins. What's still open is how you set proper rules for agents, and how you distinguish an agentic transaction from an individual's own when liability still sits with the individual. Agentic micropayments are fundamentally different behaviour, and I believe most large FIs are not ready for it yet.
What really sets CV Summit apart is that the speakers and the audience are honest about both outcomes. They'll tell you where a product found its market, where a regulation helped or got in the way, and where an idea didn't survive reality. Lessons from failure are shared as openly as those from success. That's rare at any level, and it's the most useful input for anyone building inside the ecosystem.
For my work in product management and advisory, this isn't a nice-to-have. Features are easy to ship while solutions that solve a real use case for an institution or a retail client take a holistic read of market, regulation and client need. Sustained exposure to this ecosystem keeps that read current, and it's how I turn it into strategy and products that hold up across major players, institutional and retail alike.
Thank you to Mathias Ruch, Benedek Orban and the whole team at CV VC and CV Labs for making it happen! And to the speakers I followed closely and was glad to meet at the summit and yacht afterwards: Christopher Perkins, Manuel Klein, Marianne Webber, Serge Kaulitz , Alexander Thoma, Mathias Imbach, Moritz Platt, Andy Pavia, Alex Dunn, and many others!
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