The bank of the future will be invisible - KPMG

Nice to see that more and more do embrace the "what's next?" where we must be moving UI & UX to a new level - away from pure mobile/web menu driven point and click interaction towards our best known interface - natural language.

Maybe worth visiting my earlier blog "Of messengers, chatbots & financial buddies. A future banking UX?" here at http://bit.ly/2dojmJJ where I write about the concept of a Financial Buddy

It's nice to focus on UI and UX, but in all honesty banks have been white-labelling their services for years very successfully and making a big pile of money doing so. Whether that be providing indirect access to payment services, BIN sponsorship, credit line provision, white label mortgages for brokers, identity services, the list goes on... Yes, perhaps for some retail services 'the banks' will be 'relegated to the position of white labelled service providers' but this doesn't mean that the entire banking infrastructure and business model will collapse if they aren't in control of the front end. After all, gmail still works if I use the native app on my iPhone - and I still call it gmail.

Even if banks were to become invisible, I agree with @FinextraMember that they will not disappear. However, going by trends in other aggregator-driven industries, I tend to believe that banks will NOT become invisible. In fact, they might even become MORE visible.

Take cab aggregators for example. I really don't need to know the name of the cabbie and all the other info that I get when I make a booking on Uber. But, still, Uber provides all that visibility. Why? Because Uber does not want to take responsibility for what happens after it connects me with a cab.

Take Amazon for another example. As long as it's Fulfilled by Amazon, I really don't need to name the name and address of the Seller but Amazon gives me all that info. Why? Again, for the same reason as Uber - to limit its own liability.

Same way, a Siri or a Cortana won't take responsibility if my EFT payment falls into the cyberabyss and the only way it can wash its hands off is by providing me with full visibility about the bank that it has chosen to execute my EFT.

The desire to provide visibility raises manifold in a regulated industry like banking - a Siri or Cortana won't want to be subject to the regs that apply to banks.

Welcome Big Brother, disguised as a lovely Eva ("Enlightened Virtualised Assistant") and taking care of the wellbeing of those childish citicens - and good bye to freedom, democracy and own responsibility. What comes next - Eva informing me that she donated the better part of my available funds to support a robust military mission for "restoring peace in Absurdistan" ?

Very scary, fortunately there are still hammers left to smash one's smartphone.

Almost anything is possible, but not all things are probable.  And, I have read that we tend to under estimate change in the short term and over esitmate it for the longer term. I think that is happening here.

There are some assumptions being made that I don't think cut across the board. One, that banks will be willing to be just a wholesaler of services and not own the customer relationship (Some banks will be willing to do this, but not all). Second, That customers will be willing to give up financial control of their lives to an AI "robot." (Again, some will be willing, but not all).

Probabilities work best when the issues at hand are rather simple and lead to rational decisions. Unfortunately, that's not always the case - when complexity grows beyond a certain level, people tend to look for simple solutions and to take irrational decisions. Two years ago, the Brexit decision and the selection of one of the current candidates for the US presidential election would have considered as pretty unlikely events.

Unlikelyness per se does not prevent unfavourable developments, so it makes sense to look into the potential consequences early.