512 Future of Money
Welcome to Breaking Banks, the number one global fintech radio show and podcast. I’m Brett King. And I’m Jason Henricks.
Every week since 2013, we explore the personalities, startups, innovators, and industry players driving disruption in financial services. From incumbents to unicorns and from cutting edge technology to the people using it to help create a more innovative, inclusive, and healthy financial future. I’m J.P. Nichols, and this is Breaking Banks.
Hi, welcome back to Breaking Banks. This is Brett King, your host. We are the number one fintech podcast and radio show globally.
So we’re glad you’re here. Now I was in Toronto, of course, at Sobos and something that I’ve been involved in with the InnerTribe team for over a decade now, scary, isn’t it? Is the InnerTribe Future of Money panel. And the Future of Money panel, we played a few clips last week on the show of some of the predictions that have been made in the past.
But this was a sort of important or special Future of Money panel, in that this was the last Future of Money panel to be done at InnerTribe Sobos after, I think it’s like 10, 11, 12 years that this has been a regular Feature of InnerTribe. And from next year on, there’ll be the Future of Value session at InnerTribe instead of the Future of Money piece. But being this was the last Future of Money panel, I was invited by Ennis McLeod and the team at InnerTribe to join this panel with Lita Glifitz, with some of the SWIFT team and Jennifer Sertle, Tom from SWIFT.
So check out the panel that we had at Sobos InnerTribe last week on our discussion of what the Future of Money really means after 10 years of deep dives at Sobos InnerTribe. Great, good morning. It’s so great to see all of you and to see so many people that we know, some people that we met yesterday and people that we can’t wait to meet till after this session.
So excited back to the Future of Money. Historically, money has been a universal medium of exchange, a unit that signifies worth. You’ve all been a part of that.
However, as we venture deeper into the 21st century, the notion is being broadened and reshaped by technical advances, decentralized finance, and other digital assets only challenge the concept of money, but also the very essence of value exchange. So this transition extends to how value is perceived, created, and distributed. So we’re in the midst of this transition.
This session will be the last Back to the Future of Money because we’re transitioning towards the future of money, and context is so important. And so we have a trifecta here on the panel to help us with that transition. To my right, I have Brett King.
He’s obviously, most of you know him from his podcast. He’s an internationally acclaimed author, futurist, and speaker, traveling all over the world. I don’t even know how you made it here today.
Where did you come from today? I was in Riyadh 26 hours ago or something. So you were in Rio? Riyadh. Riyadh, Saudi.
The reason I said Rio is that I recently went to the Duran Duran concert. They have a performance tonight, so Rio was on my mind. Sorry about that.
But you might have not known, but he was the first mobile app builder in the US. He had MovenBank. He is the author of so many books.
I don’t even know how you do all of that. And his podcasts are Breaking Banks and also The Futurists. And one of the things that we love best about him and what he represents today is the imagination.
Because he continues to be a vanguard of emergent technology, and his belief is the future is what we make it, optimal humanity. Love that. Okay.
So, you know, a triangle is the very, I think, most strong physical structure, so we have imagination. I’m now going to introduce you to community, and that would be Lita. And all of you probably know Lita Glypta.
She’s a seasoned leader. And what’s so exciting about her is that the three different elements that she brings, she actually was the innovation officer from Qatar National Bank. But she also actually built a fintech.
She started a fintech, Great East London software. So the ability to be a technologist. And then also, she’s currently advising people on the future of bankers like us, and really how to create coherence and make this transition.
Because a lot of people focus on the structure of the transition, and she’s helping bring us along and our communities along. And then the third, and I love, I have to say, I’ve known Brett and Lita for quite a while, but Tom is brand new to me. And Tom Schock, he’s actually the chief innovation officer for Swift.
And I just love that he has a name, Schock. He was destined to be a futurist in that environment. But so what’s so exciting is that if we have imagination, and we have community, we do need structure and infrastructure.
And so what he brings today is the fact that he’s been a pioneer spearheading business development and global payment ecosystem strategy for the past 30 years. And so he plays a critical role here with Swift to guiding senior executives to navigate, adapt the landscape structurally. And he has so much to say about fragmentation and also collaboration.
So we can’t wait to hear from him. So again, so on our panel, we have the imagination, we have community, and we have structure. So I do believe that language matters.
And about, was it 2010, I met Brett, and the concept of breaking banks was pretty radical. The idea that banking is a verb, or to go to a bank is actually a verb versus a noun, actually in my world was fairly provocative at that time. So my question to you to start us off, Brett, are banks broken? And what are some key indicators that would indicate the breakdown? Yes, I think, you know, if you’re going to say banks aren’t broken, particularly in terms of the way we have to think about banking moving forward and today, all of the fastest growing financial services institutions in the world, particularly in retail, are digital organizations, WeBank, NewBank, Alipay, WeChat Pay, and so forth.
And so if you look at just the mechanics of how we’re doing banking, all, you know, market share is shifting towards these new entrants who do it dramatically better from a customer experience perspective. And the biggest hurdle to banks being able to make that transition is not technology, but it’s organizational and culture. Because if you go to a bank, I won’t name banks, I’ve got into trouble for doing that before on InterTribe stage.
But if you go to a typical bank, you’ll have the mortgage department, the credit card department, and so forth. Whereas if you look at a player like NewBank and so forth, that’s not the way they’re architected. They’re architected for this experience delivery layer, and they’re more about the utility of the bank being provided through the technology layer rather than branch designed products being retrofitted for the digital world.
So that’s the biggest shift we’re observing right now, and that’s played out in the fact that today, more people use a mobile wallet, not a tokenized plastic card, a value store and a mobile wallet to pay, than they do an artifact that’s been issued from a chartered bank. And one of the issues, I’m in the US, and I think we don’t do as much cross-border payments as some other regions. Do you have any, and I’m also thinking of tellers and people that are down the line in the bank.
When I see everyone here at Sibos, a lot of people are in either sales or in leadership roles. How do we help support that cultural shift that you’re talking about? Well, when you get in, I mean, we just had WISE and SWIFT announce a partnership, and TransferWISE now, WISE has obviously been a leader in this. But the big game changer in this is actually wholesale central bank digital currencies and smart contracts, where we will eliminate effectively a lot of the operational side of this is going to be automated.
So you can’t do that without both smart contracts and digitized money, and neither of those are concepts that the banks have historically any experience with. So being good at doing remittances and cross-border transfers historically doesn’t really give you any benefit of experience for the world that’s coming. Okay.
So you all thought you’re going to get some coffee, enjoy the show. What I’m going to ask you is that every single person here has a role to help the people in your community, in your banking community, come along for the ride and learn these new things that Brett has just talked about. Very important.
Leda, I’d like to talk to you about having had such unique vantage points from actually being a banker, being a founder, working in technology, and now having such an important role in advising the future of money the way that you do through bankers like us. How have the aspirations of each of these subgroups changed since you actually began commentating on the future of money? I think it’s fair to say that when we started this journey, we asked ourselves considerably smaller questions, and they felt daunting at the time. So if we go back to those clips 10 years ago that make me think I should really start varying my hairstyle, to be honest with you, we were coming to the table really committed to think through the challenges, and those were uncomfortable.
But if we look at the size and shape of questions we were asking ourselves, we had no idea what was coming. We felt that the biggest frontier we had to cross at the time was new technologies, new ways of working, was actually understanding what an API is and where to put it, understanding how to collaborate with a smaller entity like a fintech. And with every passing year, we have found ourselves coming back to the table and realizing that we’re just scratching the surface, and that the questions we need to ask ourselves are so much bigger, as Brett said.
And we got that. We’ve realized that. The second realization that I think has been hard is the realization that decision makers that come together here at Sibos, senior decision makers in big global institutions, are not in control of the pace of change.
And if you can go back and listen to the full clips, there was a very clear point of transition where the bankers in the room were a little daunted by what was coming, but we still felt that we were in control of what, when, and how. And that was an illusion that was shattered, but not immediately and not painlessly. But the minute you realize that actually that the technological change is happening more to you than anything else, and that the society and economy around you is changing much more rapidly than you, and you, as a banking service industry, are only here to serve an economy.
You want to think about inclusion, you want to think about people, you want to think about commerce, whichever way you look at it, our job is to service an economy. And in the time we’ve been giving ourselves the dilemmas you heard about our role in the future and how scary it is, this world around us changed much faster than us, and we’re now finding ourselves falling short of our duties to serve that community. Now, the good news is we’re not deluding ourselves anymore, we are asking the right questions.
The bad news, as Brett said, is that we have a lot of work to do, and a lot of this work has been known for a while, we’ve just danced around it a bit, because it’s hard. It is hard. I don’t know if any of you were in the conversation yesterday about AI and humanity, and it just makes me think of Cindy, Dr. Cindy Gordon was talking about how AI really kind of helps us adapt, that what you brought to the table is that as introspective and as eager and as well-read as all of us are, we just can’t adapt that quickly.
Do you have any, like, how do you stay current yourself? When I read your, it’s always like if I want to know what’s going on in the world, I click on you and I see what’s going on, because you’re such an incredible scout. How do you kind of, how do you do this? That’s a good question, but it doesn’t have a straightforward answer. I think it’s fair to say that none of us will know all the things that are coming down the pipe.
There’s the technology, adoption cycles are coming thick and fast. When we started on this journey, most of us could go quite deep into particular verticals. You now can do that with some, but not all.
Like, there was a time, particularly when InnerTribe was young, and so was I, that everything that happened in fintech could fit in one room. Now it’s industry verticals that have immense complexity. I think there is an element of luck, having been here at the beginning of the journey that allows you a different vantage point.
The other is accepting, to sort of paraphrase Brett from a previous conversation, accepting that there is no alternative. So you will allow yourself not to learn certain things and partner with people that will bring that depth, but you will not go very far if you think, well, I’m done learning now, I’ll double down on the things I know. Curiosity is important, I think.
And I think that comes to the heart of it, is that you accept that things are changing, and so you go out looking for where those trends will be. I almost feel like we just had an intervention. It’s going faster than you can adapt, just know that.
Be curious, and then also embrace radical uncertainty. And again, I think yesterday there was the talk by Sir John Kay, who I’ve never met a night before, didn’t get to meet Simon Le Bon either, but anyway, I don’t know, comedy is not my thing, I’m trying. Where we’re going to go now with Tom is really radical uncertainty.
How do you actually create systems that allow you to anticipate? And if you think of this conference really being called Collaborative Finance in Fragmentation, Tom has been really great about creating common language systematically. So tell us about what’s happening now to facilitate common language. Yeah, I mean, I think the common language and the collaboration are key to all of this.
And you’re right, the theme for Sybos this year, it’s not just a tagline for marketing to get people to attend the show, it’s actually happening. So it’s not about, this session is called the future of money, but it’s happening, and it’s evolving and it’s changing very quickly as we see. And I think one of the things that hasn’t changed in the last 10 years is payments is still a scale business.
It’s a scale business. If you want to have a profitable business, you want to service your customers properly, you need to be able to scale that. And what that’s actually turned into in terms of innovation is we need to deliver ubiquity and convenience, right? The ability to adopt, you can build the best mousetrap in the world, but if your customers don’t adopt it, if our banks can’t make that available to their customers, it doesn’t count.
It doesn’t work, there’s no impact. So it’s definitely a scale business and the innovation that we’re doing is not only collaborative, but it has to deliver those things and allow for adoption. And I think in some of the research I was doing kind of leading up to this panel, and it was a little bit further back, it was the end of 2010.
There was an initiative that was kicked off and announced by the mobile network providers in the US. So Verizon and AT&T and T-Mobile were going to work with the British Bank and the Discover Payment Rails to build a transformative e-commerce network. So that obviously didn’t happen, right? Even with the best laid plans and 200 million customers in a country.
And actually a funny side note of this is, and probably a good lesson for the marketing people, is the name of that initiative was ISIS. So that didn’t actually age very well either. So we’ve seen examples where it didn’t work, but we have seen examples where it’s worked really well.
And Brent just made a comment to this. When it’s everywhere, when it’s ubiquitous and it’s convenient, you can buy things now obviously on a consumer front without pulling your wallet out. And that drives adoption because there’s a convenient factor in there.
So that’s really led a lot of the work that we’ve done in the way that we think about it and the drive of the work that we’re doing is through collaboration. That’s worked pretty well, especially on some of the new frontier items. As tokenization is taking off, as CBDCs are taking off, SWIFT’s been able to coalesce and bring the industry together.
And when we talk about collaboration, it’s not just our community. It’s big techs, it’s fintechs, it’s R&D, it’s academia. You know, everybody has a role in this and the more kind of diverse backgrounds and views we get on this on a global basis is super helpful.
So we don’t think we can do this alone. We know we can’t do this alone. And that’s why the collaborative efforts have been such a high priority for us and something that we will continue to do.
Can you also speak to the speed of change with systems? And you know, you’re right at the epicenter of leadership and system integration. How do you help people deal with the pace of change structurally and also through leadership? Yeah. It’s another, you know, kind of looking for some evidence.
I remember the old days when it was like move fast and break things. Right? Remember that? Remember move fast and break things? We don’t think we should move fast or break things. We actually think we should do things responsibly, which is how we approach it.
And sometimes that takes longer. But I think, you know, when we’re able to demonstrate that something’s possible, not the answer, but we get together with the community and a group of banks, for example, we’re able to demonstrate that things are possible, that this could be, that we could create value, that we could do things, not just using new technology, but actually do things differently. That really motivates a lot of people.
And we find kind of the best and the brightest step up to that externally. That motivates the people at Swift, you know, always looking for better ways to kind of operate the network, but, but add value for the, for our customers. We have great feedback loop.
And so I think, you know, those kinds of things add to the positive momentum that we get. And we’re seeing pretty good, pretty good results up to now. This show is brought to you by Alloy Labs.
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I’m thinking if the future of money is a caterpillar, and the future of value is going to be a butterfly, because what Tom just talked about was possibility. And as we were getting prepared for this panel in the back, Lita, who’s been a part, Lita, I have a best friend named Lita. And sometimes, so Lita was talking in the back about just a little bit of nostalgia around having been part of, you know, the future of money, letting it go to transform is a challenge.
Do you want to say anything about that? I like the commitment that a recurring conversation represents. So the fact that this panel has come back again and again with a combination of folks. Some of us have been on it a few times, as you saw.
But it has been a wide cast of characters. But what I have loved about the future of money as a concept is the realization that we’re not quite done with it. No matter how many, how the great and the good get together and ask some challenging questions.
We were very conscious of the fact that there was a lot to unpack. And we’re also conscious of the fact that the change year on year is big. And actually, if we look back at how much we’ve seen as a community here, I mean, it was actually almost moving to see the WISE announcement because, of course, TransferWise started life as part of the Inner Drive Challenge.
And remember how we were all like, your business model is so confusing. Is this ever going to work? So the realization that we come together to hold each other accountable in a continuing conversation and say, you know what, we were wrong about that or that came faster than we thought. What have we missed? That was the thing that I have loved the most, that as a community, there is an element of accountability.
Did the thing we say would happen, happen? Have we missed something? So it’s always a little bit serendipitous to say, well, actually, we’ve been, we’re done. This goose is cooked. We are not asking the right questions anymore because we now know the world that we need to unpack is much more complicated.
And that in itself is actually the right step. So, you know, the king is dead, long live the king kind of thing. I think it’s important to recognize, though, and shout out to Ines and the team, we’ve got standing room only here again today, which is almost every time we’re at InnerTribe it’s like that.
So I think generally within the SWIFT community is a recognition that this is where these cutting edge ideas and so forth that come from over the last 10 years, as you said, with WISE and the neobanks and the mobile wallet schemes and so forth. I mean, the reason we have such good network with all these people is namely InnerTribe because that’s where these startups and so forth started their public presence at InnerTribe. Jennifer, can I say as well, with the evolution of the fintechs has really taken an industry change, especially if you kind of think about the 10 year timeframe, right, where initially was disintermediation, competition, you won’t need a bank any longer, you know, kind of really aggressive in some cases, right? That actually evolved pretty quickly into collaboration, right? And how could we help the banks, you know, do the business better? How can we do the business with them, not instead of them? And even now with the WISE now, it’s a customer.
So you’ve literally gone from competition to collaboration to customer in less than 10 years, right? It’s a really interesting evolution to watch. I think so too. And Costa had written a book called The Castle in the Sandbox.
And I think all of us need a sandbox where we can actually have creativity. I think one of the neatest things about being part of InnerTribe is they’ve always had people from outside of the industry, sometimes artists, sometimes poets, sometimes creatives, thought leaders. And in your environments, you really need a way to get some architects in the conversation, some chefs that, you know, just think of the communities where you live and people that are doing neat things.
Just because cross-pollinated ideas really need to come kind of serendipitously. And sometimes we spend a lot of time with people that look a lot like us, which is great. So I am going to, Brett has asked us to use curiosity and imagination, and he’s often talking about the future.
So I’m going to lean into that just a bit. So we’re kind of closing an era after a decade. I’m going to imagine the year 2033.
I’m imagining that we’re on Mars, telecasting, televising, however technology is being transferred at that time. And there’s an audience of 4 billion people because we’ve done such an incredible job of inclusion that we have so many more people participating. What are two issues that have been resolved in 2033, looking forward and backward? Well I think if you talk about the Martian economy, and maybe I should do a position paper on this, maybe you and I can work on this later, but if you talk about the Martian economy, it’s highly unlikely that we will use money or even have a capitalist system of value the way we think about it today.
Because a Martian economy, the primary goal would be sustainability of the economy as quickly as possible. And so I think it’s a good proxy for the future of value concept that we’re moving to with this panel. Because if you look at the value systems we’re going to have to create in 2030s, but definitely in the 2040s and 2050s, is there’s going to be a lot of pressure on global systems to say we need better values than just producing profitability.
We need, because capitalism has produced climate change, it’s produced massive inequality, and so forth. And these problems, when we take money out of the ecosystem, are much easier to solve than today. So if you’re looking at Mars, I think that’ll be the biggest thing, is that humans expanding outside of the earth will be, and artificial intelligence.
Because in the 2030s, AI will have already taken large chunks of the banking industry and automated those, and money essentially will become black box functionality within that. So I think we have to really start thinking about what are the value systems we create beyond money. That’s great.
And as I’m saying this, I actually saw you as a hologram, actually speaking from every place you’ve ever spoken at one time. Well, I mean, the other thing to take into account with Mars is, you know, there’s going to be that 18 minute light minute delay or whatever for transmission. So you won’t be able to have a conversation.
Unless we do quantum encryption or something, you know, quantum entangled communication. There’s lots of papers in what you’ve just said there. So we’re going to move on.
How about Lina? What do you think’s been resolved by that time within the next decade? You know, I’m a much less visionary and much more humdrum person than Brett. And I was listening to you and all I could think was, at least we will have gotten rid of the mainframes. Right? Yeah.
Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely.
But actually going to Mars is the only way we’re going to deal with that. And yet bankers would probably try to take mainframes with them. I think the things that hold us back are the decisions we haven’t made, right? And as we stare into the challenges and the changes, the reality when we leave CIBOS and go back to our desks is that the vast majority of organizations have to make trade-offs that mean that we carry a lot of legacy technology that was created before the time that real-time communication was possible.
But like, leave AI out of this and we’re not quite going to Mars yet. Which means that every single organization out on this floor, on top of the amazing, actually underneath the amazing new technology, has a mainframe that is kind of my age. Not a good age for a system.
So I think that the really hard and unpleasant conversation we need to start having is switch those things off. A lot of the things that we’re talking about will not be financially possible if you’re carrying unit economics that sustain systems from like 30, 40, 50 decades. Mars is great because you start with a clean slate.
You’re not going to go with COBOL. But on Earth, the only way to start really moving at the pace we need to and being able to build some of the stuff that Brett was talking about, which is possible, right, it’s not actually abstractions into a distant future, is to stop carrying the cost and complexity and risk factors of 10, 20 technological paradigms. So Mars, no mainframes, please.
I think the great way to illustrate that, Lita, is you don’t hear startup CEOs ever talk, even in challenger banks, they never talk about their core system. You hear startups talk about their tech stack, right? And before we go, Tom, for you, there’s so much to unpack in what you shared. And a lot of people may think these are systems issues, these aren’t my issues.
And you brought up choice in decision making. Can you say that phrase again? Something about the decisions we don’t make? Well, yeah, it’s my favorite thing to say. No, it’s really important.
We always have decisions to make and they’re hard, right, particularly when it comes to innovation, technology, you have to decide where to put your money, your time, your people. So in deciding what to do, you also decide what not to do. And I always call it the CTOs, where am I going to put this decision when you’re trying to work with a new system or a new idea? Because when you go back to your organization, you have to find a cost center for it.
You have to find a team for it. You have to find a tech stack. So in the last 10 years, we’ve come a long way.
It would be unfair to say that we haven’t. But we’ve also had to make decisions and trade-offs. And in a lot of those trade-offs, we have left certain things to be solved for later or by other people, which means that we carry technological complexity, which creates risk, which creates operational complexity and cost.
The reality is the more baggage you carry, the less nimble you are and the world’s moving fast. So yeah. No, I think that just doing an inventory of the choices that we’re making and the choices we’re not making and find a way to keep that visible, I think it’s really everybody here can do that and do that better and have a little bit more introspection with that.
Tom, tell us about the future that you imagine and what’s been resolved. Yeah. I think we usually take a little bit more pragmatic approach to innovation.
And we try not to run innovation theater. So we haven’t kind of overthought the Martian economy. And maybe a note for next year, we can see if we can book Elon Musk or somebody like that can really help bring it to life.
And then we can figure out how we’re going to take care of the latency between Mars and Earth because I don’t think there’s a way to get light to move faster. And so there might be a little bit of latency in there. But I think what we’re probably going to be able to solve, and we’ll understand it a lot better, is really kind of the impact of AI machine learning.
And I think it’s very, very similar in a lot of ways to other new kind of breakthrough technologies. And with that, you could do really good things with it, or you can do really bad things with it. And people will do both, right? And I think we’ll have a much better understanding of what those bad things are or what could be enabled through that.
We’ll have kind of proper ways to assess that risk and to put mitigations and kind of the safety and structure that we need in place to address those. But I think both on the value side and on the risk side, I think that’s going to become a lot more clear. And we look at things like generative AI, for example, and you start digging into, like, why is this different? Because we’ve been automating things for 100 years, right? Automation is nothing new with the use of technology and hardware and software.
But I think there’s two main differences here. One is just kind of the adoption rate and the scale. Again, to go back to scale, it just scales unbelievably.
It’s probably expensive to do that from what we see, but it scales. I think the other thing that’s really important is this is probably one of the first times where we’re automating white-collar jobs, right? We’re not fixing something on the factory floor. And you could go through how this could be used to augment the roles in white-collar jobs as opposed to things that were more laborious or tedious in the past.
So I think we’re going to get to the bottom of that. I think we’ll know a lot more about what can and can’t be. It doesn’t mean it’s going to hit a plateau.
But I think we’re going to all get a lot more comfortable with it and really be able to kind of exploit the value that we can create with things like fraud detection and things that will really benefit the industry. That’s great. So David Bowie once said that tomorrow belongs to those who hear it coming.
The last question I’m just going to leave you with here is how will you find a way to attune yourself to hear and prepare for the transition from the value of money to the future of values? Thank you. I think there’s one other really interesting piece of this, which is if, you know, Thomas, you talked about AI. I think it’s completely underestimated.
And the best illustration I’ve heard of what sort of disruption AI will be, and this counts for banking or the world in general, is it’s akin to the printing press in terms of the level of disruption. And if you look at Europe going through the Dark Ages, the Middle Ages, the printing press produced the Renaissance, really. It was the driver behind that.
So new arts and sciences and the pursuit of humanity to think that we could do bigger and better things. And AI’s biggest role in reshaping philosophy of humanity will be destroying a lot of the legacy thinking and philosophy that we’ve had. Because even just at the core of human society today, that we have the need to work to survive, AI, because it attacks every job simultaneously across every industry, is going to have to make us reexamine that.
So that’s a really core part of the way we think about value. Because if you don’t have to work to get money to put a roof over your head, for example, which hopefully humanity will evolve into this over the next 40 to 50 years, maybe much sooner, then that’s a game changer. Because now it’s not like, you know, when I come to an event like this and I meet people at the event, one of the first questions you ask is, and what do you do? And that’s defined today by money.
It’s like, this is what I do to get money to survive. Whereas in 20 or 30 years, maybe when I ask you that question, it’ll be something completely unrelated to money. It’ll be something you’re passionate about, something that you think you can change the world with, or a social contribution you can make to the world.
And I think that’s the really exciting part of this transition from money to different value systems that’s enabled by AI and these technological advances we’re making. So I’d have Tom and Lita say a last word as well. Yeah.
I mean, I couldn’t agree more from what we see and the potential with the AI machine learning. We’re tip of the iceberg without question. And again, it’s not as if, you know, what will happen, it’s already happening.
You know, you could say this year is the end of kind of audio and video and photographic evidence. Whatever you see, you can’t be sure that that’s the, you know, your voice could be copied with tone and pace with three seconds of audio. You know, so it’s like, again, we’re talking about the future here.
The future’s here. It’s happening. And I think we are on the kind of the tip of the iceberg.
I think in terms of the transition from money to value, I think that’s an easy one. And primarily because of tokenization. And it’s going to be tokenizing value.
And that’ll be values that we think of, whether that’s a bank deposit or a security or a carbon credit, something along those lines. So that’s going to happen. We’ve seen estimates where there could be $16 trillion of tokenized assets by 2030.
So who knows if that’s a good estimate or not, but it’s a big number, right? Too big to ignore. So yeah, we’re here. I think tokenization drives that.
And I think that that’s going to be, you know, kind of the natural transition to value. The one other thing I would add about that too is I think what we value, and Brett to kind of build on your point, is going to change as well. And so things that we might not have assigned value to, your identity, data privacy, those kind of things, you know, I don’t think anybody would sign up on a social media platform and give all of your details away today to share photos with friends.
Maybe some would. I wouldn’t. Right? But that’s not where we started.
I think all of that changes. So what we value is going to change, you know, and it’s going to be broader than just money. And I guess we’ll wait for the session next year and we’ll see how the value of these other things compared to the value of money, but that’s a future session.
I think there is a, I’m like in violent agreement with what has been said. I think we’re going to be forced to think about certain things differently. So particularly the spread of tokenization and CBDCs being part of our language now, the idea of the boundary between public and private and what the rules governing each are changing, identity access, privacy, all of those things will become part of the lexicon much more.
The way we think about them will continue shifting. And I’ve been optimistic about the trajectory we’re on. I think AI is a good litmus test of whether we’ve learned how to learn because it’s a paradigm shift technologically speaking.
And it’s actually interesting to see a lot of people going, well, this is new because it’s new to me. And it’s actually, it’s not new. It’s been coming for quite a long time.
And the fact that everyone’s playing with mid-journey now doesn’t mean it emerged fully formed. Equally, just because every bank out there is going through a process of trying to understand dangers, opportunities, board packs and all the rest of it, we’re doing the things we’ve always done. My biggest question mark around how our industry is approaching AI is, did we learn from the last adoption cycle? Because I am seeing the indications that we haven’t.
I am seeing indications that people go, well, this is new to me, so it’s new. And I’m going to take my time with my compliance team to work out which bits I like and which bits I don’t like. And while I do that, the world will wait.
And if we had learned one thing from the last 10 years, it should be that the world doesn’t wait. It doesn’t wait for us, it doesn’t wait for anyone. So if we accept that the last 10 years have shown us the strengths and weaknesses of our approaches, as this paradigm that is new to us is coming into our lives, I am hoping, but not yet believing, that we will show our homework, that we’ve actually learned how to learn, and that we won’t be naive about timings, and we won’t be naive about control.
Because I agree with both of you, we’re at the tip of the iceberg of what comes, and we will be able to participate, but we won’t be able to control this as an industry. That’s great. I love the word participate as an important part of that.
I think what I am going to leave you with is the idea that perhaps we lean into the world that Brett introduced us to, and as you meet people, start with what you care about, not what you do. Because what you care about really is what matters, and allow you to have affinity within the communities that you’re building. And I do believe that it’s only in community that you can collectively prepare and adapt and learn.
Thank you. And Brett’s going to have the last word. Well, if you’ll let me.
Yes, of course. We do have a couple of minutes left, so I will say, do you guys remember the digital asset grid, which was introduced at InnerTribe? You’re talking about tokenization. It’s like, that was an artifact that was so much earlier than its time, and now we’re talking about digital assets all the time with the metaverse and so forth.
But I will leave you with this one thought, right? And this is why it’s really interesting, is what does a bank look like in the world of artificial intelligence? And I get asked a lot, obviously, Bank 4.0 came out, you know, my book came out in 2019. And I get asked a lot, what is Bank 5.0? And Bank 5.0 is when banking becomes completely automated. And if you’re honest, and you think about how banking and money and payments works today, there is almost no function of a traditional bank that won’t be automated by artificial intelligence.
And so there are two types of people in the banking world, those that work with artificial intelligence, and those who are soon to lose their job to artificial intelligence. That’s it for another week of the world’s number one fintech podcast and radio show, Breaking Banks. This episode was produced by a US-based production team, including producer Lisbeth Severance, audio engineer Kevin Hirsham, with social media support from Carlo Navarro and Stilby Johnson.
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Thanks again for joining us. We’ll see you on Breaking Banks next week.
