Intersekt 2026 ran on 3 and 4 September at Crown Promenade in Melbourne. Cognito’s Jonathan Buxeda and Denise Foo were on the ground across both days, working with clients and media. We put six questions to them afterwards.

What felt different about this year’s Intersekt?

Jonathan: The venue change was a big one. Intersekt moved to Crown Promenade after previous years’ events ran at the Grand Hyatt, and the way the exhibitors were laid out made it far easier to engage with the businesses holding booths. We had a couple of clients there with stands, and being able to move between sessions, client conversations and media work made a real difference.

The other change was who turned up. Previous years saw smaller businesses looking for a foothold, looking for visibility. This year almost everyone I spoke to was from a large, established business, often operating in a tightly regulated and complex part of the market. FinTech Australia deserves a lot of credit for the work that got the sector to this point.

In previous years, the energy was around moving fast and breaking things. This year it was about maturity.

Which topic had the most pull-through?

Denise: The future of payments, and I know that sounds like the obvious answer. It came up on panel after panel in different forms. Agentic commerce. Embedded finance. Cross-border. Stablecoins. There was a huge amount of discussion about where money movement goes next and who ends up building the rails.

Most of it was operational, relating to settlement times, compliance load and correspondent banking relationships. These topics speak to what a business actually has to change internally before it can move money across borders at volume.

Assistant Treasurer Daniel Mulino picked up the same thread in his keynote. He described the payments system as going through a revolution, and pointed to the strategic plan for payments modernisation committed to in the 2026–27 Budget, with public consultation to follow. He also flagged digital assets and tokenisation, where legislation has already passed and volumes are climbing across equities, bonds and other asset classes.

Hearing so many industry leaders work through the same set of questions over two days told me a lot about where the sector’s attention sits.

And which topic didn’t get the attention you were expecting?

Jonathan: AI, in a way. It ran right through the programme and there were panels devoted to it, so it was hardly absent. What I did not expect was the tone.

There was very little fear-mongering. I have sat through plenty of industry discussions over the past two years where AI gets framed as a threat to be managed. Intersekt was more hopeful than that. The conversation was about how AI supports the people and the products.

One result is that AI’s impact on jobs got far less airtime than I anticipated. The consistent message across several panels was that humans stay at the centre of the product and the customer relationship. Nobody I heard was treating the human touch as negotiable. AI is there to add speed and to widen what a small team can cover, playing a supporting role rather than the main act. Whether that turns out to be lip service or not will show up in headcounts across the industry.

Mulino made a related point from the policy side. He noted that banks, insurers and telcos are now using AI in scam prevention, turning the same technology the perpetrators use back on them.

What was the most memorable panel?

Denise: This might sound biased, but the cross-border payments panel we worked on with several of our clients was a standout.

Cross-border is a hot topic right now. A lot of Australian businesses are going global and a lot of global businesses are looking at Australia. What made the panel work was the mix on stage. Airwallex is an Australian business expanding offshore. Worldpay is a global business moving into Australia. Banking Circle sits underneath much of that movement as infrastructure.

The discussion covered what a business needs in place before it expands and what seamless cross-border payments deliver once they are running. Regulation came up too, with all three panellists sharing real operational learnings rather than a tidied-up version of events, and that does not always happen on a conference stage.

One comment from Airwallex’s James Teodorini has stayed with me. He took the old Sinatra line and pointed it at Australia, quoting “If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere”. His argument was that Australian customers are unforgiving and the market is closely regulated, so it is a hard place to operate. That makes it a useful proving ground. If the product holds up here, it will travel.

How was the media presence this year?

Denise: Stronger than I expected, and by all accounts stronger than previous years.

ABC was there. The Capital Brief team came down in force and filed across both days. Simon Thomsen from Startup Daily was moderating panels as well as reporting. Daniel Mulino’s keynote secured coverage that went well beyond the journalists in the room.

We had several clients at the event, and they were able to talk to those journalists face to face. Chris Titley, the host of FintechFun, recorded interviews with a number of them for his podcast. Those were free-flowing conversations about the business, what they made of the conference and what they were hearing from other attendees.

What should fintech comms teams think about in the next 90 days?

Jonathan: Two things.

The first is a translation problem. I have been in fintech and financial services for close to a decade, and some of this material is still hard to explain and hard to follow. The stablecoin conversations at Intersekt were good, and they make sense to a technical B2B audience. The hurdle for comms teams is getting those same concepts across to everybody else, because that is the level you pitch at for most mainstream coverage.

If you want these conversations to travel beyond the trades – and I would exclude Capital Brief there because they covered the technical material properly – you have to find a way to talk about stablecoins or tokenised securities in language your mother or younger brother would follow. That gets more pressing as these products move further into the mainstream. Just as inflation data lands harder in the context of the price of an avocado rather than the CPI intricacies of an iPhone, communications needs to translate how these payments advancements will be felt by ordinary Australians.

The second is regulatory homework. Make sure your team knows exactly what was announced in Melbourne. Mulino released the Financial Innovation Strategy, accepted every recommendation of the statutory review of the Enhanced Regulatory Sandbox led by Maha El Dimachki, and confirmed the existing legislative sandbox framework will be repealed and replaced with a more flexible model run through ASIC’s relief powers. He also announced a financial innovation committee to bring industry, regulators and government together, and said regulators are considering thematic sandboxes in priority areas.

Financial services is a heavily regulated industry, so we have to communicate in a way that satisfies the rules. Clearer regulation is also a commercial priority for many of our clients, which means we should be communicating in a way that helps the case for it.