The Bank Of The Not-So-Distant Future

The Bank of the Future

Walk into a branch today and it still looks familiar. Counters, brochures, polite quiet. On paper it feels stable. In truth, time is moving faster than the balance sheets. A simple test tells the story. Take one product that still settles overnight and try making it instant, end to end. If that proves impossible, that delay is the larger structural problem in miniature.

By September 2025 the EU Data Act is due to give customers a clear right to direct access to and sharing of their data. By 2026 European Digital Identity wallets are slated to be available across the EU. At that point people will not switch bank in the old sense. Their software will move value to where terms are better and where trust is earned.

Large banks already report material savings from automation in public updates and results calls. That helps the cost base, but it also frees customers to move faster. Tools that streamline the bank also help clients compare, refinance and transfer with little friction. Efficiency on its own is no longer protection. For years inertia was the moat. People stayed because moving was tedious. That funded everything. Software, including AI, does not tire. It sweeps idle balances, closes unused credit lines and reroutes payments without waiting for a meeting. Advantages built on customer forgetfulness are evaporating.

Three positions look structurally sound, and each can be built with what banks already have.

First, trust with a product attached. European Digital Identity wallets will need credential issuers who stand behind what they sign. Verification, liability and risk are familiar ground for banks. The opportunity is to package those strengths into a service, verified reputation with contractual performance levels. This means building the credential factory now. Catalogue every attribute that can be lawfully attested, from identity to financial standing. Work out which attestations carry capital exposure and which are operational risk, and price them accordingly. The product is assurance here, not marketing.

Second, orchestration that earns its keep. The shift is from owning customers to owning how money moves between them. The focus is on what others depend on: settlement, reconciliation, dispute handling, uptime. Revenue comes from reliability and time to finality. Batch processes running overnight in 2026 will invite churn. The operating rule is simple. Instant confirmations keep money. Delays export it. This is infrastructure banking. The winners become infrastructure others cannot afford to build and cannot do without. Pricing shifts from spread to uptime and service levels.

Third, judgment. The human kind, and keeping the human always in the loop. Automation can handle the routine, but not everything that matters is routine. The value concentrates where software hesitates: complex ownership structures, family disputes, cross-border arrangements, succession planning, situations where a wrong call triggers a regulatory cascade. These files need names and accountability, not chatbots. Clients remember who kept them out of trouble when it mattered and they pay for that memory.

None of this works on systems built in the nineties. Putting new screens on old cores does not fix the underlying problem. The harder truth is that even rebuilding the core for today's demand misses the point if we already know what is coming next. Agentic software is already in production: tools acting on a customer's instructions, making decisions without asking permission, moving money across providers in seconds. The infrastructure being built now needs to handle that load, not the load from two years ago. Upgrading systems to do faster what they already do is not the same as building systems that can speak to autonomous agents making thousands of decisions per second.

Terms need to be readable by machines, not just humans. Actions need to be auditable and they need to happen now, not tomorrow. When the IT team says rebuilding takes five years, the answer is to make the scope smaller until it takes one, and to build for what is actually coming, not for what already happened. One should start where customers complain most. Deposits that take too long to clear. Payments that get stuck. Trade confirmations that arrive the next day. Design those fixes on the assumption that the customer is not the one calling anymore. Their agent is, and it is calling fifty banks at once and comparing the answers in real time. If something still settles overnight it is already costing customers. If it cannot respond to an API call from an autonomous agent it will cost more.

Margins are going to compress no matter what. The revenue has to come from somewhere else. Fees for keeping systems up. Fees for speed. Fees for getting things right the first time. Some banks will figure out how to charge for things they used to eat as costs. Hosting other people's data under proper rules. Selling compliance services to smaller institutions that cannot afford to build it themselves. Whatever gets charged for, the service levels need to be in writing and they need to hurt when missed. Reliability is reputation and reputation is what gets sold.

Culture will decide who gets through. Caution made banks stable, but too much of it now just looks slow. If a change that would cut abandonment by a quarter sits in committees for two months, that is not prudence, that is cost. Banks that make it through this will run different approvals. Legal, risk, product and technology in one room with a shared timeline, not a deck doing laps. Ship smaller changes more often. Weekly if possible. Some will call that reckless. Measure what the current pace is costing and decide which risk is bigger.

I may be wrong on timing by a year either way. I am not wrong on direction. Control is shifting toward the individual and software does not wait. Banks that accept this and rebuild for it will still matter in 2033. They will look less like storefronts and more like infrastructure that others rely on. They will still be here. The rest will not.

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