Looking around Money 20/20 this week, it was easy to see a clear trend going on. Business-facing or business-to-business companies like Airwallex, Payoneer, and ClearBank, dominated the show floor, while consumer apps such as Revolut, Starling, and N26 were nowhere to be found.

“I think many fintechs have pivoted to enterprise sales having found consumer hard to make sufficient unit economics — plus it’s pretty expensive to get a stand and attend M2020 so you need to be selling to other attendees to justify the outlay,” Richard Davies, CEO of U.K. startup lender Allica Bank, told CNBC.

“B2B is definitely in good shape — both SME and enterprise SaaS [software-as-a-service] — providing you can demonstrate your products and services, have proven customer demand, and good unit economics. Embedded finance certainly is part of this and has a long way to run as it is in its infancy in most cases,” Davies said.

B2B fintechs are startups that develop digital financial products tailored to businesses. SaaS is software that tech firms sell to their customers as a subscription. Embedded finance refers to the idea of third-party financial services like bank accounts, brokerage accounts and insurance policies being integrated into other businesses’ platforms.

Niklas Guske, who runs operations at Taktile — a fintech start-up focused on streamlining underwriting decisions for enterprise clients — describes the sector as being in the middle of a renaissance for B2B payments and financing.

“There is a huge opportunity to take lessons from B2C fintechs to uplevel the B2B user experience and deliver far better solutions for customers,” said Guske. “This is particularly true in SME finance, which is traditionally underserved because it has historically been difficult to accurately assess the performance of younger or smaller companies.”

One area fintech companies are getting excited by is an improvement to online checkout tools. Payments technology company Stripe, for instance, says a newer version of its checkout surfaces has helped customers increase revenue by 10.5%.

“That is kind of incredible,” David Singleton, chief technology officer of Stripe, told CNBC. “There are not a lot of things you can do in a business that increase your revenue by 10%.”

Meanwhile, companies tightening their belts at the event is also a theme.

One employee of a major firm that usually attends the event said they have cut down on the number of people they have sent to Money 20/20 and have not even bought a stand. The employee was not authorized to speak to the media.

Indeed, as companies look to scale as they cut back on spending, many say a key priority is adequately managing risk.

“When funds were readily available, many fintechs could subsidize poor risk assessments with investor money,” Guske said of the sector, adding that in today’s climate, fintechs are only profitable if they can identify and secure the right customers.

“This is another moment where the proliferation of new data sources and the adoption of sophisticated risk modeling enables fintechs to better target their ideal customers better than ever before,” said Guske, who raised more than $24 million from the likes of Y Combinator and Tiger Global.

The main area that drew the most hype from Money 20/20 attendees, however, was artificial intelligence.

That’s as ChatGPT, the popular generative AI software from OpenAI which produces human-like responses to user queries, dazzled fintech and banking leaders looking to understand its potential.

In a closed-door session on the application of fintech in AI Wednesday, one startup boss pitched how they’re using the technology to be more creative in communications with their customers by incorporating memes into the chat function and allowing its chatbot, Cleo, to “roast” users about poor spending decisions.

Callan Carvey, global head of operations at Cleo, said the firm’s AI connects to a customer’s bank account to get a better understanding of their financial behavior.

“It powers our transaction understanding and that deeply personalized financial advice,” Carvey said during her talk. “It also allows us to leverage AI and have predictive measures to help you avoid future financial mistakes,” such as avoiding punchy bank fees you could otherwise avoid.

Teo Blidarus, CEO and co-founder of financial infrastructure firm FintechOS, said generative AI has been a boon to platforms like his, where companies can build their own financial services with little technical experience.

“AI, and particularly generative AI, it’s a big enabler for fintech enablement infrastructure, because if you’re looking at what are the barriers that low code, no code on one side and generative AI on the other are trying to solve if the complexity of the overall infrastructure,” he told CNBC.

“A job that typically would take around one or two weeks can now be completed in 30 minutes, right. Granted, you still need to polish it a little bit, but fundamentally I think it allows you know to spend your time on more productive stuff — creative stuff, rather than integration work.”

As businesses hyper-focus on how they can do more with less, both tech-forward and traditional businesses say they have been turning to revenue and finance automation products that handle back-office operations to try to optimize efficiency.

Indeed, Taktile’s Guske notes that the current demand to continue scaling rapidly while simultaneously reducing costs has driven many fintechs to reduce operational expenses and improve efficiency through an increase in automation and reducing manual processes, especially in onboarding and underwriting.

“I see the biggest, actual application of generative AI in using it to create signals out of raw transaction or accounting data,” said Guske.