I had a interesting conversation recently with Chris Barker, head of digital and engineering for Royal Bank of Scotland. As usual, the conversation moved around data analytics, deep learning, artificial intelligence, building enterprise data systems, separating content from processing, replatforming the back-end infrastructure and core systems and more. The bit that intrigued me was when Chris said he can see the need for a bank account disappearing.
Now this builds on the idea of a digital identity being built by banks and governments on a shared ledger concept – the blockchain – but our conversation went further, and began to outline how and why ‘bank accounts’ could be unnecessary in the future.
