Platform or Pipe: Why Most Banks Already Chose

Every few years someone tells us banking is about to be disrupted. It never quite happens.

So when Dharmesh Mistry and Lou Carlozo came on to talk about their new book, The Intelligent Ledger, I asked: Why is this time different?

Dharmesh's take? Banking has adopted plenty of individual technologies, from mainframe to client-server, internet, mobile, cloud. None of them disrupted anything. But the iPhone didn't win by being a better phone. Nokia was building a better phone. Kodak was building a better camera. Garmin was building a better GPS. The iPhone was all of them at once, and the market reorganised around it in under five years.

His claim is that banking now has its own version of that convergence — what he and Lou call the Quanvergence: open, accessible data; agentic AI; tokenisation; and quantum, arriving together rather than in sequence. Not the best AI bank. Not the best tokenised rails. All of it, in one place.

So platform or pipe? And who will win?

📱 The Intelligent Ledger ships at the end of September from Palgrave Macmillan.

Hot take 🔥"Banks have already chosen pipe, but they're not admitting it. Nobody wants to hear it. If you're selling products and that's all that you're doing, you're making your money from margin on a product — that makes you a pipe. So just admit it and get on with it." — Dharmesh Mistry

Hot take 🔥"Change or die by 2032." — Lou Carlozo

🎧 Listen now wherever you get your podcasts.

Keywords: Fintech, Financial Services, Agentic AI, AI, Quantum, Digital Transformation, Tokenization

Timestamp:

00:00 Welcome and Guests