Last year, when hopping on a plane to discuss trending business topics was normal, the notion of a world with digital currencies was all the rage at two Fortune conferences. Last June, in Montauk, N.Y., Facebook-affiliated Libra had just released some details about its plans. It was the talk of Brainstorm Tech. Closer to the end of the year, at the Fortune Global Tech Forum in Guangzhou, a hot topic was the Chinese government’s intention to launch a digital currency. Now that we’re all...

For someone who proclaimed that fintech’s days are limited, I spent a lot of time last week talking about fintech. My thesis isn’t that fintech isn’t a thing, but rather that one day all finance will incorporate tech and also that the incumbent financial services companies already have some fearsome advantages. I recently met perhaps the fintech world’s best embodiment of that thesis. He is Zach Perret, co-founder and CEO of Plaid, the company that links financial services providers digitally...

With humility and a tad of dark humor about how the world was falling apart around us, several Fortune writers and I hosted a dinner Thursday night in an unseasonably warm San Francisco to talk about fintech. We gathered a who’s who of the technologically savvy companies that are trying to reinvent financial services: Andreessen Horowitz, Ant Financial, Brex, Calibra, Coinbase, Honey, Plaid, Ripple, Ribbit Capital, Robinhood, SoFi, Square, Stripe, and more. Our mission was to gather ideas...

This is the web version of Data Sheet, Fortune’s daily newsletter on the top tech news. To get it delivered daily to your in-box, sign up here. Last year, when Fortune decided to start an annual conference focused on fintech companies, cryptocurrency investing, and blockchain-related innovation, I suggested that we call the event “Brainstorm Finance.” My argument was that some number of years down the road there would be no more fintech, only financial companies that use the best technology,...

This is the web version of Data Sheet, Fortune’s daily newsletter on the top tech news. To get it delivered daily to your in-box, sign up here. Timing is everything in life, and I’m pleased as punch that Fortune is convening its first-ever Brainstorm Finance conference Wednesday in Montauk, N.Y., at the eastern tip of Long Island. When we dreamed up a conference that would bring together the titans of Wall Street with the purple-haired entrepreneurs of fintech, we couldn’t possibly have known...