The shift is already happening

There’s not a single meeting, problem-solving, or document with my name on it that hasn’t had some version of the same conversation or the same question:

“How is this practically making life better or easier for the person?”

I can’t switch that obsession off. Working for a bank, that question has remained the same.

What has changed is that customers are no longer asking banks to make it easier for them. McKinsey's Global Banking Annual Review 2026 is direct about it. Customers are already using AI to find higher-yield savings accounts, refinance debt, and get financial advice. They are not going to their banks to ask what to do.

And this shift is happening at speed. Generative AI reached 45 percent of US working-age adults in two years. Digital banking took fifteen. And over that same period, fintechs grew from 10 percent of industry revenue in 2021 to 17 percent in 2025.

The response I see from most banks: Double down on advisory. Build smarter recommendation engines. More “we know you” communication. We know better.

I think that’s the wrong bet.

I think you know yourself better. And if you’re not making the decision you really want, it’s because you didn’t have the clarity or the tool to make it work.

There's a temptation, especially now, to make AI the reason to perform advisory. To be the authority. To let more data and faster processing be the reason to tell customers what to do next. I don't think that's what we're here to do.

Instead, trust can be built on performance.

Your fixed spend, like rent or electricity, just works without you opening your app. Your supplier gets paid on the last day of the payment terms because you decided that's how it should work. When you're out spending, it takes a millisecond to get clarity on whether it's within the guardrails you set. There's never an in-app message persisting on your front page (after 17 clicks!) wanting you to invest the 50k you deliberately kept free on another account because you know you'll need it next month.

No banksplaining

The traditional model runs like this: the bank assesses your engagement, makes the plan, and gives you access to the best version of their advice based on profits. I'm not challenging the business model. I'm challenging the premise: that the bank knows better.

Most customers don't believe their banks know better.

When people want financial advice they trust, 50 percent turn to friends and family. Only 42 percent turn to their bank . For the next generation, that gap is even starker: 78 percent rely on people they know, and 44 percent trust creators on social media over institutions. The top 10 finfluencers globally have more than six times the combined following of the top 10 financial institutions. Nearly one in five young people who don't invest say the reason is simply that they don't trust financial institutions . The signal is hard to ignore.

We don't tell you what to do with your money. We show you your reality. Contextualized. Your income, your actual spending, your patterns, your context. The way you run your life and thereby your economy. You run. You decide. Because it was always your choice to make.

That’s what designing for trust looks like. Not a better recommendation engine. A thousand small moments where the bank gets out of your way, reflects your reality back to you, and lets you decide.

Banking that works so reliably in the background that you stop thinking of it as banking at all. That’s invisible banking.

Your bank is the trusted infrastructure

AI assistants may increasingly be an interface, but they cannot hold deposits, move money, or operate within the financial system. That’s where regulated banks come in. The future is not AI replacing banks. It’s AI relying on banks as the trusted infrastructure underneath. And the banks that will matter in that future are not the ones with the best recommendations. They’re the ones with the most reliable infrastructure, the fastest pace on new money core services, and the platform that’s built to be built on.

We want to get out of your way and show up with clarity, without judgment. And equally, we want to be there for you where there is a decision for you to make and a context we could share.

Most banks want to matter more. We think your bank should matter less.

Less to check. Less to manage.

On the best of days, you never open your bank app. And that’s the point.