The IntelligentLEDGER

I’ve had the good fortune to be a guest on Dave and Dharm Demystify twice. Both times, he asked versions of the same question: what does it feel like to build a bank from scratch? It always sparks the question — if you’re going to do it all from scratch, how do you avoid falling into the trap of building a copy of what already exists?

The truth is that when you have no legacy infrastructure to protect, no existing customer base to cannibalise, and no organisational immune system defending last decade’s business model, the way to do things better can be surprisingly clear. After all, you don’t need to predict the future. You just need to be honest about the present.

That’s what this book is.

Griffin is, by Dharmesh’s taxonomy, a pipe bank. Deliberately. We hold a full UK banking licence, we’ve built core infrastructure from the ground up, and we provide it to fintechs and platforms building modern, tech-led financial products.

Unlike most of the pipe banks Dharmesh looks at, though, our gross margins are around 90%. That’s not an accident — it’s what happens when you make an unambiguous strategic choice and build everything around it. We’ve never wanted to own the customer journey — and in giving that up, we’ve been ruthlessly efficient about building valuable infrastructure. We want to be the best possible foundation for the companies that build on top of us.

But! I’m not here to talk about us as a case study. It’s more to make the point… it’s okay to be a pipe bank or a platform bank. The danger lies in thinking you’re one when you’re really the other.

The banks that will stagnate over the next decade will be the ones that refuse to choose at all — those that try desperately to keep one foot in economics and the other in aspiration, and wound up with the structural economics of neither.

Banks, partly by design, and partly by accident, are not known to make decisive strategic decisions when confronted with an evolving technological and cultural landscape. The banker’s mentality is to avoid loss, not to embrace potential.

The question this book really asks isn’t so much about one technology or another as much as about the culture and strategy of banks. It’s whether the people running the financial institutions of today will be able to see clearly enough, and act decisively enough, given everything that’s institutionally arrayed against both.

Dharmesh ends with what he calls the Monday Morning Question: who, in your organisation, is accountable — by name, with a budget and a timeline — for building the Intelligent Ledger capability this book describes?

It’s the right question. And the fact that most readers will find it difficult to answer is precisely the point.

For the past forty years we have repeatedly convinced ourselves that each new technology wave was revolutionary. We computerised branches, built ATM networks, launched internet banking, embraced mobile apps, migrated to the cloud and opened our systems through APIs. Each step made banking faster, cheaper and more convenient. Yet none fundamentally changed what a bank actually is.

In fact, one of the biggest mistakes the banking industry makes is confusing digitisation with transformation whilst, beneath every innovation, sits the same truth: financial institutions are built around the very same principles that have existed since the Medici a millennia ago. What are they? Maintaining a ledger of financial transactions.

The problem is that a ledger is designed to remember the past, whilst customers increasingly need help navigating the future.

Nobody wakes up in the morning wondering what happened to their money yesterday. They worry about their money tomorrow. They worry about whether they can afford a home; whether they are saving enough for retirement; whether changing jobs is financially sensible; whether their children will be secure in an uncertain world; whether they can afford tomorrow.

Today’s banking systems are extraordinarily good at recording what has already happened, but remarkably poor at helping people decide what should happen next.

That is why this book is not really about artificial intelligence, quantum computing, tokenisation or digital twins, even though all of those technologies feature prominently in the pages ahead. It is about what happens when these technologies converge.

History rarely changes because of a single invention. It changes when several technologies mature simultaneously and reinforce one another. The smartphone did not transform the world because of a touchscreen. It transformed the world because mobile broadband, processors, batteries, cloud computing and app ecosystems all arrived together. Banking is now approaching its own moment of convergence, and the consequences are likely to be every bit as significant.

The Intelligent Ledger is all about moving from a passive record of financial history to becoming an active participant in our financial lives. It understands context rather than simply transactions. It anticipates needs rather than waiting for instructions. It simulates outcomes before decisions are made and increasingly executes those decisions on our behalf. In other words, the intelligent ledger evolves from recording money to understanding people.

That idea challenges almost every assumption upon which modern banking has been built.

For decades, banks have competed by manufacturing and distributing financial products. In the decades ahead, they are far more likely to compete by providing intelligence. The institutions that understand their customers best will create the greatest value, whilst those that continue measuring success through the number of products sold will discover that the products themselves have become commodities.

This is also why I believe many readers will initially disagree with parts of this book. They should. Books about the future are not valuable because every prediction proves correct. They are valuable because they force us to rethink assumptions that have become so familiar we no longer question them.

Whether every forecast made here unfolds exactly as described is almost irrelevant. What matters is that the direction of travel is becoming increasingly clear. Artificial intelligence is becoming infrastructure. Money is becoming programmable. Financial advice is becoming autonomous. Banking is moving from a world of transactions to one of continuous intelligence.

If that sounds ambitious, it should.

Every major technological revolution has sounded ambitious until, with hindsight, it became obvious. Looking back, the internet feels inevitable. Smartphones feel inevitable. Cloud computing feels inevitable. None of them felt inevitable at the time. The Intelligent Ledger is another of those ideas that, a decade from now, leaves us wondering why we ever imagined banking could work any other way.

The real question, therefore, is not whether this transformation will happen. It is who will lead it. Funnily enough, I recently added a cartoon to my presentations on this theme.

Change management is the life of our world. It is the core of what makes success and failure. Those who change succeed. Those who don’t, fail.

This is critical thinking, as some institutions will recognise that the future belongs to those who understand customers rather than products. Others will continue optimising twentieth-century business models with twenty-first-century technology. History suggests those are not the organisations that define the future.

This book is not simply a prediction about where banking is heading. It is a challenge to everyone responsible for building it.

The Intelligent Ledger won’t give you answers, but it will help you think about adapting to change and, if nothing else, that’s a good thing.

“It is not the most intellectual of the species that survives; it is not the strongest that survives; but the species that survives is the one that is able best to adapt and adjust to the changing environment in which it finds itself.”
— Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species