LAS VEGAS — Disruption. Disintermediation. Reinvention. These three themes rocked the first installment of Money2020, a bustling conference that attracted a full house of 2,000-plus attendees and, more importantly, it brought in very senior executives from major financial services players ranging from American Express to Visa, MasterCard and Discover; from Wells Fargo to Bank of America; and from Google to PayPal. Money, old and new, crammed into the Aria hotel in search of a roadmap to what it will look like in a scant eight years.

The biggest headline out of the conference: The mobile phone changes everything.

Mike Cook, a Wal-Mart vice president whom MIT's Technology Review recently called the most powerful man in payments, threw down the gauntlet at Money2020. He stated that if a payments solution portraying portending to be new does not build upon the inherent security and intelligence built into the smartphone, Wal-Mart wants no part of it. Period.