Fintech NerdCon 2026

Fintech NerdCon 2026 is a two-day, operator-focused conference taking place November 18-20 at the San Diego Convention Center. Created by Simon Taylor and the team behind Fintech Brainfood, the event deliberately avoids the traditional expo-hall format — there are no sales booths or badge scanning. Instead, the agenda is built around keynotes, roundtables, live podcast recordings, workshops, and off-stage conversations among founders, product leaders, and senior operators working on payment rails, banking infrastructure, trust and risk systems, and AI-driven fintech products. Past speakers and attendees have included leaders from companies like Circle, PayPal, Coinbase, Cross River Bank, and Figure.

The target audience is fintech operators: founders, engineers, product managers, risk and compliance specialists, and investors who want substantive, practitioner-level discussion rather than surface-level industry chatter. Attendees should come for the density of serious builders in one room, practical takeaways on topics like underwriting, compliance, and applied AI, and the kind of unscripted, hallway-and-bar conversations that the organizers say drive the real value of the event. Following a well-received debut edition in Miami (2025) that drew roughly 1,100 attendees, the 2026 San Diego edition is positioned as a larger, refined version of the same premise: substance over sales pitches.