On the Horizon

Dateline: Woking, 21st August 2026.

I came across an interesting cross-reference, which I thought I’d reflect on here with a little bit of comment to highlight some current topics. The cross-reference came about because I was putting together some material for a workshop that I’m going to be running for some senior bank executives. The workshop is to look at key technology trends and help leadership teams develop their strategic plans in the three to five year timescale. That is, what trends should they should using to shape their business plans beyond the immediate tactical responses of the next one to two years. By coincidence, when I was looking for something else, I came across the The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) Emerging Technology Horizon Scan so I got a cup of tea and started reading through it and began to compare my three key trends with theirs.

OK, so let’s look forward to 2030 then. What is on the horizon for financial services? What struck me reading the FCA scan was that we agreed on many of the technologies and that these technologies, if taken together, point towards a new architecture for financial services. Artificial intelligence, digital identity and tokenisation are usually discussed as separate trends. I think they are converging around a new organising principle: the smart wallet.

The FCA and I both had the consumer use of AI as the most important trend in the strategic timescale. This is not surprising because, as I have bored various audiences senseless with over the last few years, it is what customers do with AI (not what banks do with AI) that will shape the financial services industry as we move into the even newer new economy. It is an intellectually challenging element of strategy, best served through solid scenario planning for now, I think, because of the great uncertainty that surrounds consumer uptake and direction. However, given the statistics already coming back from the marketplace, it’s pretty clear that consumers are adopting AI as a central element of their financial planning and decision-making so it is not much of a stretch to imagine that they will soon give it more executional responsibility (once the agents can be properly identified and regulated and monitored, of course.)

As the FCA note in their report, the shift to agentic finance and commerce might lead to separate channels designed for AI agents or it might mean existing channels shift to become “agent-first” rather than “human-first”. Either way, it could change how digital services are designed and how consumers engage with the, which is clearly true. I wonder if what they call “the extended consumer” is really so far away, with merchants and other service providers already beginning to implement (eg) Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers to deliver service to agents alongside their web servers, which are designed for people.

Things are moving quickly here. Google’s Agent2Agent protocol (which allows independent AI agents communicate with each other) has just been moved into the Agentic AI Foundation, the same body that already hosts MCP. The foundation has grown to more than 250 members in a few months, with Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Anthropic, OpenAI, Bloomberg, Shopify and Block all backing it. So I think we can reasonable expect more progress here before 2030.

When you put all these things you end up with a picture that looks very much like the picture that Victoria Richardson and I drew for our book “Money in the Metaverse” (LPP: 2024). That is a Venn diagram that shows a coming to together of markets, assets and owners that has smart wallets (wallets that can be controlled by AI as well as people) at the very centre. In other words, AI creates new economic actors, digital identity establishes who those actors are, tokenisation gives them assets to exchange, and the smart wallet becomes the place where those capabilities come together.

If AI agents are going to become economic actors, then identity ceases to be merely a compliance issue. It becomes market infrastructure.

Hence for the next trend, we had slightly different views. The FCA went for the use of AI by criminals, (or “synthetic crime“ in a more general framing). It’s a serious problem, for sure. Recent research indicatesthat synthetic identity creation (fabricated personas built from scratch) remains the single largest attack category and is up 173% year-on-year, alongside live video deepfakes, face swaps and document forgeries. Deeepfake fraud alone grew sixfold!

I opted for a slightly wider perspective and almost inevitably went for digital identity. In other words, I optimistically reached for the solution rather than for the problem. It seems a defensible position to me. I see synthetic crime, fraud and friction all as subsets of the more general problem of digital identity (and lack thereof). If we had a working digital identity infrastructure then we wouldn’t have synthetic crime because criminals would not be able to construct synthetic identities. As my bumper sticker version of this complex topic renders it, I can make a fake video of Brad Pitt but I can’t make a fake digital signature of Brad Pitt.

Once trust is implemented then ownership can become programmable too. That’s why digital identity and tokenisation belong in the same strategic conversation rather than in separate technology silos.

Given that, it is unsurprising that for final trend, the FCA and I are in complete alignment. This is where tokenisation and its various refractions adumbrate next generation Financial Market Infrastructure (FMI). While there is currently a lot of focus on stable coins and tokenised deposits right now, and with good reason, the longer-term more strategic perspectives sees these as pathfinders laying down the rails for the more generalised digital asset economy to come. Not only is this fascinating to explore, but I think it is also rather exciting because the shift to tokenisation means not only new infrastructure but new institutions.

(I strongly agree with the economist Tyler Cowen, who once said in a podcast that “I don’t think of crypto as a currency. I think of it as a new set of institutions”.)

As people who know far more about the topic than I do have noted, the current “two tier” arrangement of central banks and commercial banks is not a fundamental law of nature, but a set of institutional arrangements that derive from a previous era, a set of economic relationships and traditions that are beginning to fade as we move towards what will clearly be a multipolar world.

It is good to see the UK active in exploring that two tier relationships in a tokenised world. The Bank of England’s Digital Pound Lab has just begun an experiment with NOBO Finance, Dun & Bradstreet and Polygon Labs which has an exporter receiving an advance via a public stablecoin rail while a UK importer settles with a simulated digital pound, exploring commercial stablecoin rails and central bank money as interoperable rails rather than rivals.

Just to highlight one other examples, Korea’s commercial banks are preparing to issue deposit tokens under Project Han River, where the Bank of Korea provides a blockchain-based wholesale CBDC and commercial banks build tokenised deposits on top of it ahead of rollout which illustrates how not only the rails but the institutional relationship are shifting.

Whether these experiments result in institutional changes themselves, and whether those institutional changes will arrive quickly or slowly, these real-world projects reinforce the same strategic direction: value, identity and agency are becoming increasingly concentrated in the wallet rather than the account.

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This reinforcement of the crucial role of the digital wallet at the heart of the coming financial world, especially given my view of the wallet as the interface between digital public infrastructure and the consumer/citizen, is timely. because a strategic vision of the future financial services, one that does not assume stasis and the entrenching of incumbent business models and power, will surely see a shift of focus from the bank account to the wallet as the core means to deliver inclusion. On which topic…

The FCA Horizon Scan talks about “structural inclusion”. I strongly agree with their view that consumers previously excluded from financial services of all kinds because of low literacy, limited mobility or lack of documentation could access those services through agentic interfaces that bypass legacy barriers. Agents acting as “hidden heroes” can interpret intent, simulate eligibility and negotiate rationally on behalf of users, turning exclusion into participation.

Why waste time and money trying to teach financial literacy to consumers who have only the most basic financial knowledge when a better way to increase the overall financial health of the public would be to get bots to deal with the finance sector for them. For decades we have treated the bank account as the centre of retail financial services. I suspect the next decade will belong to the wallet.

Together these four give you one story per major section of the piece, all dated within the last week, and they reinforce the wallet-as-organising-principle thesis rather than just decorating it.

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