Tech first. Banking second

Gavin Allen: Are we heading into an era where banking is no longer something you consciously do – your AI agent does it for you?

Brett King
Futurist, author, and speaker

Brett King: That's certainly the end game. Currently, there's still the cognitive element of, “This is my money. Will it be handled correctly?” But things will be different in future: you won't have to make decisions. The bank will become an invisible layer of technology infrastructure. AI will drive the cost of delivering everyday banking services close to zero, so payments, transfers, and other routine tasks simply happen automatically in the fastest and most efficient way. The real differentiator will be how well the bank understands your needs and responds to them. Utility equals trust.

In China, Alipay and WeChat Pay are trusted because they work. It’s not about access to human advice anymore. The bank I choose will be the one that helps me get stuff done. Native technology companies are going to be better at banking than banks because it’s all going to be about tech. It’s Revolut, Nubank and WeBank. The Top 20 fintechs have 4.1 billion customers between them, while the Top 20 retail banks have 2.7 billion. And the traditional banks have actually lost customers over the last five years.

Gavin: You can’t be a successful bank without being a successful tech firm?

Brett: Yes, that’s why bank transformation is critical. It's also why many banks will struggle: they need to become tech-native organizations. That’s tougher than doing technology transformation or digital readiness. You can revise the stack and make improvements, but if your organization is still structured around products, and your branch network still commands budget that would otherwise go into tech, you just can’t get to where Nubank and these other players are.

Gavin: The CEO of Huawei’s Digital Finance Business Unit, Jason Cao – and co-author, with you, of the book Bank 5.0 – says the banking divide won't be between those who experiment with AI and those who don’t, but between banks that scale intelligent systems operationally and those trapped in fragmented pilots, never truly committing.

Brett: Yes, it has to be a core transformation: in culture, organizational strategy, technology approach, distribution. An incumbent may say fintech players aren’t that different, offering the same products, but that’s just what they’re required to do for compliance – operationally you wouldn’t recognize Nubank, Revolut, WeBank, Stripe as banks from their org chart. These are technology companies that happen to do financial services. The question is, how does a traditional bank get to that state?

Gavin: Is it possible? Can they?

Brett: JPMorgan Chase and the Chinese banks have done a pretty good job in responding – they’ve had to, to remain relevant. But what comes next is a whole different layer of technology competency and requirements. So, the question is whether these organizations have the culture required to get there. The tech-native companies don't have that cultural gap, don’t need to re-educate their people. And even with their AI tech debt now, it’s probably easier for them to catch up.

Alex Sinclair, CTO of GSMA

Gavin: What is the cultural change they need to embrace?

Brett: A technology company is “tech first,” while an incumbent bank is “banking first.” You can’t be a bank and frame technology as just the tech stuff. That’s not how these purely digital players operate. The tech is what enables them to do what they do. Does tech fundamentally change who you are as a traditional bank? Yes – it has to! And that's the cultural challenge. Traditional banks don't know how to operate as technology companies, or have the right organizational structure or people. That becomes the underlying problem.

Gavin: How do they start making the transition?

Brett: At the top. Culturally at JPMorgan Chase, it's clear that Jamie Dimon understands the only way to get there is to become a technology-first bank. He's spending $18 billion a year to do that. Their annual expenditure on branches is about $2.3 billion. There's absolutely no question that he sees the future of the business as a technology platform. That's the level of change needed.

Gavin: How do banks win customers’ trust – with good LLMs, or efficient use of AI?

Brett: Banks won't build their own large language models—they're simply too expensive. Instead, they'll combine existing foundation models with smaller, specialized AI models. The real differentiator won't be the model itself, but the quality of the bank's customer data. Few banks have yet brought all of that data together in a unified foundation. Without that, an AI agent can't truly understand individual customers or personalize its recommendations. If it's trained on incomplete or fragmented data, it will make mistakes.

Gavin: What's the role of companies such as Huawei in this mix?

Brett: Tech partnerships are much more critical in this environment because it all comes down to your ability to execute on the tech. Banks will spend billions adapting to this new reality. They will need organizations like Huawei to help them even attempt it.

Gavin: Will AI make sophisticated financial advice available to everyone, or will it simply reinforce existing inequalities?

Brett: AI will be the greatest source of financial disparity we’ve ever seen. It's already creating a super-wealthy class of AI entrepreneurs or investors. They're going to judiciously choose to restrict access to models, as Anthropic temporarily did with some of its most advanced AI models. That practice will be institutionalized because the best model gives me the best capabilities, and I’m prepared to pay for it. It’ll be a super-exclusionary moat. Ultimately, with employment issues, it likely means the end of capitalism. AI is implicitly designed to remove humans from the workforce because automation at scale is how you create the most profit. That level of financial exclusion, with wealth pooling to those who own the technology layers, means you can't argue capitalism is working anymore.

Gavin: What does that mean for regulators and responsible bank CEOs?

Brett: Some bank CEOs want to keep the status quo because they understand the complexities and changes that are happening, or they oppose open data. But that's not realistic. The United States has tried to protect incumbents and, unlike other G20 countries, still lacks a widely used national fintech charter [banking license ]. If you want to open a bank there, you have to open a traditional bank. But it just means 99% of the industry there has slipped behind. From a real-time payment and banking perspective, Brazil, India, and China are now 10 years ahead of them. You can't stop this from happening, and the CEO has to be the one who recognizes they have no choice but to change.

Gavin: What is the recurrent advice you give to CEOs wanting to make this transformation?

Brett: With very few exceptions, I haven't seen a bank that has made a career technologist their CEO. And that astounds me. Some have embraced tech and been willing to learn, but having a career technologist, rather than a convert? No. Second, the most common question I ask is, “How far have you progressed in bringing all of your customer data together?” Banks talk about AI and agentic systems, but they don't have a unified data foundation. You have to start with that.

Gavin: How do you see the banking landscape evolving over the next five to 10 years?

Brett: Digital entrants are already the fastest-growing banks. The biggest bank in Europe in 2030 will be Revolut. To me, the interesting question is whether a new generation of AI-native fintechs will emerge over the next decade to disrupt today's digital banking leaders. Established fintechs can adapt faster and run technology better than traditional banks, but AI-native banks will introduce an entirely new wave of competition."