AI is bigger than the smartphone

Twenty years ago, four critical things happened: cloud computing became mainstream; the smartphone was launched; Satoshi Nakamoto released the bitcoin whitepaper; and the global financial crisis killed all trust in traditional financial institutions.

All of these things pretty much happened at the same time.

Twenty years later, a multi-trillion dollar world has appeared on the back of these things. We may still see traditional financial firms as core, but a huge number of unicorns have appeared by leveraging these technologies and cracks in the traditional empires.

Source: Panagiotis Kriaris

The thing is that we are at the same precipice today as twenty years ago. Twenty years ago, most firms denied change would happen. In fact, when the iPhone launched, the companies they targeted – Blackberry and Nokia (remember them?) – laughed. It was the Kodak digital camera moment or the Blockbuster streaming day.

These companies withered on the vine, and are now a shadow of their former selves.  In a similar way, most bankers said bitcoin was a scam and that fintech would never make it into mainstream markets. How wrong were they?

So, where are we now? Well, we sit on another precipice of massive change thanks to AI. I wrote a couple of blogs about such things the other day …

• If you are still 'doing digital', you are too late
• Build a bank from your bedroom? Why not!

… and one commentator said that it makes Monzo and Revolut look like legacy.

Well, I guess they are. The fintech stuff is last year; the AI stuff is now.

The critical thing here is that old banks, neobanks and challenger banks may all be looking at AI as something they need to “add-on”. Wrong!!! AI is not an add-on, it is the next generation architecture after cloud and mobile. After apps and APIs, we are in the age of deep-dive analytics. It is completely different.

Just as BlackBerry thought that the iPhone had lost the plot by having no keyboard, Google could lose the plot by thinking that people still wanted to search rather than learn. ChatGPT has replaced the search field. Google is in catch-up mode with Gemini, but the world has shifted fundamentally. They see this – better than Blackberry did – but do you see this?

We have moved from fintech to intelligent finance, and it is a ground-breaking reinvention of everything. So ask yourself: are we just adding AI to check a box or are we redesigning our business so that we couldn’t exist without it?

Thanks to Lee McCabe for asking these questions, and yes, I’m already there. Meantime, I’m going to party like it’s 1999.