The quite surprising thing about financial innovation isn't the technology—it's the psychology. People would rather use a system they understand than one that works better.
Consider how we pay for things. Swiping a card feels like control. Tapping your phone feels convenient. Cash feels like privacy. SWIFT transfers feel like security for your multi million dollar transfer through complexity. The friction isn't a bug—it's a feature that makes us feel like we're in charge of our money.
Partly, this is why every financial innovation faces the same pattern: early adopters love it, institutions resist it, and normal people ignore it until they can't anymore. The resistance isn't about the technology. It's about admitting that the system you've spent decades learning to navigate is obsolete.
Banks know this. They've built entire business models around learned helplessness. Make the system complex enough, and customers will pay fees rather than switch. Make compliance scary enough, and competitors won't enter. Make change risky enough, and regulators will slow everything down.
But here's what they're missing: the future is already here. It's just hiding.
The Perfect Future We Can't Have
Imagine this evolution taken to its logical conclusion. AI runs the world's financial system. Not metaphorically—literally. There's one EarthBank, and every human and robot has only one account in it. Your face is your wallet. Walk into any store, take what you need, leave. The system knows who you are, what you took, and settles instantly through open protocols.
No cards. No payment processors. No fees. No fraud*. Every transaction is reversible and trackable. No foreign exchange because there's only EarthCoin. No credit risk because the AI sees every transaction in real-time and prices risk perfectly.
Merchants can bill you directly through your unique identifier. Your coffee subscription adjusts automatically. Your ride ends with instant settlement. Your freelance work pays out as you complete it. The entire financial layer of human civilisation becomes invisible infrastructure.
And here's the beautiful part: when finance costs nothing, humans and robots can focus on what matters. Making the best coffee in the world. Reversing aging in biological components.
It's elegant. It's efficient. And I think it's inevitable.
And it's impossible.
The Bug
We don't have EarthBank because we have countries. Countries have egos. Countries want their own currencies for economic reasons, political reasons, and because that's what countries do. They're not about to hand monetary policy over to a global AI, no matter how efficient it would be.
But here's the deeper issue: even if countries wanted to cooperate, people wouldn't let them. The psychology that makes us resist small changes becomes paranoia when facing big ones. A global financial system controlled by AI triggers every possible fear: loss of privacy, loss of control, loss of national sovereignty.
This seems like a fatal flaw. How can you have perfect financial infrastructure when every country insists on its own monetary system, and every citizen insists on their own privacy? Doesn't this completely break the elegant vision?
You might think so. But it doesn't actually matter as much as you'd expect.
The Surprise
The counterintuitive fact is that you don't need cooperation to build interoperability. You don't need one currency to have seamless payments. You don't need global governance to have global infrastructure.
What if every central bank adopted blockchain? What if the only way to issue currency was through digital assets—essentially, government-backed stablecoins? What if customers could open simple accounts directly with central banks, which are really just identifiers in a distributed system?
Suddenly, you have the technical infrastructure of EarthBank, just with multiple issuing authorities instead of one. The user experience becomes identical to the single-currency future, but the political structure remains acceptable to existing powers.
You still walk into stores and leave. Your face is still your wallet. Transactions are still instant, trackable, reversible. The only difference is that a few oracles handle cross-currency conversions in the background but users do not need to know about it at all.
This is already happening. Central banks are building digital currencies that look suspiciously like stablecoins. Payment systems are becoming programmable. Identity verification is becoming seamless. The infrastructure is slowly emerging without requiring political coordination.
The Customer Expectations
But the real driver isn't technology—it's customer expectations. Once people experience instant, free, seamless payments, they can't go back to the old system. This is why financial innovation spreads so quickly in places where it's allowed to.
The surprising insight is that customer behaviour changes faster than institutions. People adopted mobile payments before banks understood them. They started using peer-to-peer transfers before regulators figured out. They embraced BNPL before credit card companies saw the threat.
Every friction point in today's financial system exists because institutions built it for themselves, not for users. Credit card companies need interchange fees and your overdue payments. Banks give you a cards and hidden fees. Payment processors need transaction volumes. Everyone needs their cut.
But what if the marginal cost of financial services approached zero? What if moving money cost nothing, accepting payments cost nothing, accessing credit cost nothing? The entire value chain collapses into infrastructure that just works.
This is what becomes possible when we will have perfect flow. When every transaction is visible to the system, traditional banking becomes unnecessary overhead. Credit decisions become algorithmic and instant. Risk models become close to perfect because they see everything.
The Network Effect
The small thought is that information mostly eliminates risk. When the system knows every participant's complete financial history in real-time, it can price risk perfectly. When transactions are reversible and trackable, fraud becomes less relevant. When everything is programmable, terms can adjust automatically.
This creates powerful network effects. More participants mean better risk models. Better risk models mean lower costs. Lower costs mean more economic activity. More activity means more participants. The flywheel accelerates toward zero-cost finance.
The companies that understand this are quietly building the infrastructure that will define the next century. They're not waiting for permission or cooperation. They're just building better user experiences and letting network effects do the rest.
The Psychological part
The transition happens gradually, then suddenly. Early adopters gain competitive advantages through lower costs and better user experiences. Network effects accelerate adoption. Regulatory frameworks evolve to support rather than hinder innovation.
But the real breakthrough is psychological. The generation that grew up with smartphones doesn't understand why payments should be complicated. The businesses that grew up with APIs don't understand why finance should be different. The countries that grew up with digital infrastructure don't understand why they should use legacy.
The Future
The future I described isn't just possible—I think it's inevitable. The economic incentives are too strong, the technical capabilities quite clear, and the customer demand is quite obvious.
The question isn't whether this happens, but how quickly. And if I’m lucky enough to avoid early health problems—cancer, diabetes, heart issues—I hope to see it in my lifetime.
The future of money is no money at all—just seamless value transfer that happens so naturally we forget it was ever complicated. And despite all the obstacles, despite all the reasons it can't happen, we're going to build it anyway.
The only question is whether you'll be part of building it, or just watching from the sidelines as the world changes around you.
While this future may be 20-30 years away, for now use Wise—transparent with their fees and charges, and quite seamless for cross-border payments.