AI and the Future of Banking

CHAPTER 12Epilogue

All books that start with a prologue – albeit one in this case that is so apparently straightforward as asking what is meant by both money and banking – deserve a proper ending. Whilst this book may have reached an end, the story of AI is very much at a beginning, not only with regard to the banking industry but relative to all industries and professions.

To consider the future of banking, AI aided or otherwise, we need to be able to think about the future of money. We recognise that the nature of its current existence has arisen not instantaneously but rather through a form of evolution. In closing his book ‘The Ascent of Money’, Niall Fergusson refers to the ‘Descent of Money’ as if it's entered some form of downwards spiral. I would argue that the direction is not ‘downwards’, but rather that it is simply responding to a volatile environment of change that embraces not only AI but also Blockchain, Open Banking and whatever else proves to be the ‘next big thing’.

Fergusson also suggests that there is an inherent instability of the money system, driven in part by our own human behaviour, which is increasingly changing to align to the digital age but also because of the ‘hard-wired fallibility’ of human beings. It seems more evident that ‘we’ as humans could be the ‘weakest link’ in the financial process of the future.

In evolutionary terms, organisations that have proved ultimately to be ‘unfit’, such as some of the major US investment banks like Lehman ...