The End of “Emerging” Tech: Why the Future of Banking Looks Like Nothing We’ve Seen Before#
“Blockchain, Internet of Things, Artificial Intelligence—these are not emerging technologies. They have already emerged.”
I tried to give a thought-provoking keynote at the Asia Bank Tech Forum 2023 and challenged the audience to rethink their definition of innovation. I argued that the technologies we obsess over today are merely tomorrow’s legacy systems. To understand where banking is going, we first have to understand the history of how humans get work done.
Here are the key takeaways from the talk on the true path to the next generation of banking.
The Evolution of Productivity#
Human history can be broken down into three distinct phases of work, moving from linear to exponential growth:
- The Manual Age (Linear): For thousands of years—from early agriculture to the Medici banks of the 1400s—productivity was tied strictly to population. If you wanted more output, you needed more people. The formula was simple: Humans took data, applied rules, and got an answer.
- The Industrial Revolution (Assisted): Machines began assisting humans. While the paradigm remained the same (applying rules to data), the efficiency of machines allowed production to finally outpace population growth.
- The Information Age (Automated): Computers changed the game by allowing us to feed rules into a machine before doing the task. This allowed for consistent, repeatable automation—the birth of modern digital banking.
This history of mechanization explains why production has exploded over the last 60 years. However, we are now entering a fourth, radically different phase.
The AI Paradigm Shift: Flipping the Script#
The most profound insight from this talk is a fundamental shift in how we process information. For the first time in history, we aren’t just automating rules; we are discovering them.
- The Old Way: We feed Data + Rules into the machine → We get Answers.
- The AI Way: We feed Data + Answers into the machine → We get Rules.
This is a massive shift. We currently generate 2.5 quintillion bytes of data daily, yet we utilize less than 1% of it because we are limited by the rules we currently know. Machine learning allows us to uncover rules for things we couldn’t previously define—like language, thought, and image recognition.
Banking is Necessary, Banks Are Not#
As technology evolves, the “bank” as a physical location or distinct entity is disappearing. Bill Gates’ famous 1994 prediction: “Banking is necessary, but banks are not”.
We are seeing this reality today. Airlines like ANA are becoming banks, and open banking platforms are empowering thousands of small businesses to provide banking utility to their local communities. The future of finance is not just digital; it is open, embedded, and decentralized.
What Does the Future Look Like?#
If AI is writing the rules, where does that leave us? The honest answer is: We don’t know.
Because the new paradigm generates rules from data rather than human logic, the future of banking will likely look like nothing we have seen before. However, the potential is limitless. The goal isn’t just better technology; it is total inclusion.
The ultimate question isn’t about the tech itself, but the outcome: “What will it look like when all 115 million Filipinos are connected without any barrier to the global economy?”.
Want to dive deeper into the shift from linear banking to exponential fintech? Watch the full video to see how the financial services ecosystem will leverage these levers to achieve 10x growth.