"The bank branch was never the point. The future of finance is code — and it's being written by everyone but the banks." — Futurist Jim Carroll
This is part of my ongoing Trends Scorecard series, where I go back into my own archive, dig up the predictions I actually made on stage and in print, and grade them honestly against where we've landed. This time the industry is Financial Services and Banking. I have been telling banks, credit unions, insurers and wealth managers for two decades that "faster is the new fast." So how did the calls hold up? Here's the scorecard.
The setup: I started telling bankers to innovate before it was cool
I have been speaking to the financial world for a very long time -- to VISA, Wells Fargo, American Express, the Texas Credit Union League, the National Australia Bank, Credit Suisse, and dozens of community banks and wealth management firms in between. And for most of those years, I have been making the same core argument: the comfortable, slow, branch-and-vault world of finance was about to be turned upside down by mobile technology, by a new generation of digital-native customers, and by competitors who don't look anything like a bank. Back in 2008, in the smoking crater of the financial meltdown, I was already telling leadership teams that the volatility would pass but the disruption would only accelerate. Here is how I framed it then.
Key point: financial services, banking and insurance innovation hasn't gone away. It's going to come back with a roar, and the leaders in this industry are positioning themselves now.
And I have logged serious stage time in this sector. I had Claude dig through my blog and pull together the banking and financial services groups I've keynoted for over the years:
- Banks — Scotiabank, RBC Financial Group, BMO Financial Group, TD Bank, CIBC World Markets, Wells Fargo, Enterprise Bank, Deltec Bank, Fidelity Bank (Cayman), American Community Banker Association
- Credit Unions & Consumer Lending — Allegacy Credit Union, Texas Credit Union League, Credit Union Management Association, Credit Union Directors Association, Credit Union Direct (Drive Conference)
- Investment, Wealth & Asset Management — T. Rowe Price, AEA Investors, E*Trade, Investment Funds Institute of Canada, GBC Asset Management, Global Family Wealth Managers Conference, Trez Capital
- Payments & Card Networks — Visa, American Express, Discover Financial Services, Elavon Merchant Services, Electronic Transaction Association, DataCard
- Accounting, Advisory & Professional Finance — KPMG, Deloitte, Price Waterhouse, EY National Tax Conference, CPAmerica, American Institute of Certified Public Accountants, Society of Management Accountants, Financial Management Institute, Treasury Management Association, American Fidelity
- Global & Institutional Finance — International Finance Corporation (World Bank Group), International Financial Executives Conference, Canadian Finance & Leasing Association, US Farm Credit Cooperative
And those are only the ones I've blogged about — there have been plenty more.
So how did the calls hold up? Let's pull the receipts.
Prediction #1 — "Mobile is going to eat banking" (2009) — Hit
In 2009, on my way to keynote the Texas Credit Union League, I was pointing at a South African text-message bank called Wizzit and a mobile banking portal in Turkey as proof of where the whole industry was headed. The financial crisis was still raging, and most bankers were thinking about survival, not smartphones. I told them to look up from the wreckage.
Quite clearly, mobile is going to play a huge role in financial services, and it's happening NOW!
The grade: — A clean hit. In 2026, mobile is not "a huge role" in financial services -- it is the front door. The branch is now the exception, the app is the default, and digital-native banks like the ones I described in 2009 are mainstream. Calling this in the middle of the 2009 crisis, when the industry was looking backward, was the right read at the right time.
Prediction #2 — "The smartphone becomes the new credit card" (2012) — Hit
In 2012 I was on stage at VISA's Prepaid Forum and at a global lottery industry event, making the same provocative point at both: we had only ever reinvented cash one time before, and we were about to do it again.
if you think about it, we've only redefined cash once in our history -- when credit cards were introduced. We're about to do it a second time as smartphones become the new credit card!
The grade: — Hit. This was two years before Apple Pay even launched. Today the phone is the wallet -- tap to pay, QR codes, peer-to-peer transfers, and a whole generation that taps a watch at the register. The "second reinvention of cash" I described in 2012 is simply how money moves now. I also said no single player would "win" the space in 2012 because the infrastructure build was too big. That caution aged well too.
Prediction #3 — "The next generation doesn't use cash at all" (2014) — Hit
In 2014, CNBC interviewed me for a piece on trends shaking up the financial industry. My contribution was a story about asking my own sons for cash on a kayak trip -- and getting a blank stare.
They told me they don't use cash, and that's huge. The next generation doesn't use money at all.
The grade: — Hit on the generational behavior. A decade later, the cash-free young adult is the norm, not the novelty -- they live on tap-to-pay, on Venmo-style transfers, on cards and phones, and many of them genuinely never carry bills. The directional call -- that the next generation would abandon physical money -- was right on the money. (Pun fully intended.)
Prediction #4 — "Everybody is about to become a bank" (2016) — Hit
In 2016, Independent Banker magazine asked me what community banks should worry about. My answer was that the most dangerous competitor was no longer the bank down the street -- it was the technology company quietly moving into payments and lending.
With an increasing number of organizations getting into the banking space, you may need to change the essence of what you do and how you do it to keep up with reality.
The grade: — Hit, and this is the embedded-finance call before "embedded finance" was a buzzword. In 2026, Apple, PayPal, Square, Stripe, Klarna, Robinhood and a thousand fintech startups all sit inside the financial stack. Buy-now-pay-later, open banking APIs, and a checkout button that is quietly a loan -- finance got embedded into everything, exactly as I warned community bankers it would.
Prediction #5 — "Banks become short-term lending utilities" (2019) — Live / too early
In my 2019 "20 Trends into 2030" piece, I painted a picture of finance in 2030 where ownership gives way to access, and the bank's role shrinks down to something far more transactional.
We used to take out mortgages and loans to acquire the things we wanted, but now we simply get the things that we want for but a short time, and then move on to the next thing. We generally just share the stuff that we need rather than purchasing it for the long term. The result is that most banks are now just short term lending institutions.
The grade: — Live, but too early -- and partly off. The "ownership to access" shift is real (subscriptions, leasing, shared mobility), and embedded short-term credit like BNPL has exploded. But "most banks are now just short term lending institutions" overstates it. As of 2026 the big banks are very much still in the mortgage and long-term lending business, and the great generational wealth transfer is making the advisory and wealth side bigger, not smaller. I had the direction right and the magnitude wrong. The target date was 2030, so the clock is still running -- but I would not bet on banks collapsing into pure short-term utilities by then.
The ones I got wrong
Two calls deserve a candid accounting, because a scorecard that only celebrates the wins isn't worth the paper it's printed on.
First, the timing on cash. In 2014 I wrote this, and I want to own it:
I truly believe one day in the future, cash simply won't exist in the form that we know it today -- bills and coins. The question is when; it's simply a matter of timing.
I gave myself an out with "it's simply a matter of timing," and I am glad I did, because in 2026 cash is absolutely still here. It has shrunk dramatically as a share of transactions, but bills and coins did not disappear. People hoarded cash during the pandemic. There are real equity, privacy and resilience reasons cash persists. The behavioral trend was right; the obituary was premature.
Second, and more bluntly, my Bitcoin call. In that same 2019 look ahead to 2030, I wrote:
The concept of cash has also disappeared, but die-hards are still talking about BitCoin as the 'next big thing' (But that went by the wayside when the UN outlawed cyber-currency because of the massive environmental damage that occurred through the energy resource usage that was required to support it!)
The honest grade: Wrong-leaning, and I'll say so. I was skeptical of crypto as a durable, mainstream money story -- and on "Bitcoin replacing cash" I still feel reasonably safe. But the specific prediction that cryptocurrency would essentially be regulated out of existence over energy concerns did not happen. Instead we got Bitcoin ETFs, institutional adoption, a shift toward less energy-intensive consensus mechanisms, and stablecoins quietly becoming real payment rails. Not to mention fraud at scale! The energy critique was legitimate; the conclusion -- that it would all "go by the wayside" -- was not. That one stays on the board as a miss, and it's a useful reminder that being early and being skeptical are two different ways to be wrong.
What the scorecard tells us about what's next
Here's my method, and it's the same one I have used for twenty-five years: I don't predict by staring at the technology -- I predict by watching behavior, especially the behavior of the next generation, and then asking which business models break when that behavior becomes the default. That is why the mobile, the smartphone-as-wallet, the cashless-generation and the everybody-becomes-a-bank calls landed: I was reading people, not gadgets. And it's why my misses cluster in one place -- whenever I put a hard end date on a behavior ("cash will vanish") or bet against a messy, resilient phenomenon ("crypto goes away"), reality took the slower, weirder path.
So where does finance go from here? That's a separate conversation, and a longer one than a scorecard can hold. I've mapped it out sector by sector in my current series, The Way Forward — the trends, the barriers, and the playbook for acting on them. If these receipts convinced you the method works, that's where you'll find where it's pointing next.