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Thanks again for your very insightful follow-up, really appreciate the depth of your reflections.

You are absolutely right that none of the trends I mention in my blog guarantees disruption. My blog simply explores a potential scenario, not a certainty. And I fully agree that, taken individually, AI, CBDCs, Digital ID, DeFi, quantum threats, etc., are not (yet) strong enough to destabilize major incumbents.

Where I see a shift is in the combination of these forces. Historically, banking has been remarkably resilient, often more resilient than its critics expect. But the next phase of digitalization may finally challenge not the balance sheet strength of banks, but their role in the value chain.

Regarding your question: “Can you think of three use cases where genAI will spawn fintech competitors and cut deeper into banking?”

I think the most transformative one could be a true financial assistant, potentially embedded inside a BigTech super-app, not just answering questions, but acting on behalf of the customer. If AI becomes the interface, then banks risk losing the entire front layer where differentiation happens.

The implications of such an assistant, combined with ongoing trends like digitalization and flows becoming more real-time would be significant:

• The assistant would recommend products purely on customer value, not bank margin → This instantly erodes many cross-subsidized or cash-cow products.

• Optimal cash allocation becomes automated → Less idle money on current/savings accounts, fewer overdrafts, fewer high-margin short-term credit products.

• Payments become instant, cheap, and embedded everywhere → Meaningful pressure on interchange revenues and domestic payment monopolies.

• Insurance shifts to usage-based and continuous-risk pricing → Lower margins and reduced bundling advantages.

• A large part of today’s intermediaries, who act as friction points and protection layers, disappear as everything moves to real-time rails.
  → This removes barriers that currently shelter incumbents.

In such a world, banks could remain extremely important, but primarily as regulated balance-sheet factories operating behind the scenes. The competitive battlefield might shift from “Which bank has the best front-end?” to “Which AI intermediary controls customer attention and trust?”

And in that scenario, yes, the winners would probably be the largest incumbents (acting as this back-end factory) and the BigTech player(s) offering the AI assistant, while Tier-2 and Tier-3 banks could be hit hardest.

Thanks for the feedback.

When I said “why aren’t more governments worldwide doing this?”, I wasn’t referring to A2A RTP systems in general, those are indeed being rolled out and promoted by governments globally. I was specifically referring to cases where a government funds an A2A RTP system so that it becomes free for both users and merchants.

In the Eurozone, for example, we have SCT Inst, but when it’s used at merchants (with Wero being the upcoming example), merchants still pay a considerable fee.

Your point about rapid onboarding by banks is also valid. However, as always, banks tend to follow market demand. If a payment method is free for users and merchants and strongly promoted by the government, adoption by both groups would accelerate and banks, whether private or public, would be compelled to follow their customers’ expectations.

That’s why I still believe the “free” aspect could be the golden bullet. Once that’s in place, much of the rest follows naturally. Of course, this remains more of an opinion than a proven fact, as no other country has yet implemented such a model at scale (so the sample size of my opinion is not statisticallly relevant today :-)).