Last week, my good friend and podcast co-host, Dave Wallace, predicted that we may see artificial general intelligence (AGI) by the end of the year.As the saying goes: “You have to shoot for the stars to reach the moon”I personally think that might be over-optimistic as even Ray Kurzweil forecasted AGI by 2029 back in 2005. Ray has a canny knack for predictions, with 86% of his 147 (listed on Wikipedia) coming true.However, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei now says it could be as soon as 2026, so maybe Dave is not over-optimistic at all.So what does this mean for banks and fintechs? I don’t envy sitting at the helm of any company trying to second guess what happens next. What I do know is that in uncertain times, it’s best to have as much flexibility as possible – the ability to turn on a sixpence (or dime in the US).Why? Because it is not only AI that is making great strides at the moment, but many other technologies, not least things like quantum, photonic computing (using light rather than electrons in chips) and Web3.The latter may not seem new, but innovation in Web3 is moving fast, and now with the significant possibility of support from the Trump administration in the US, it may just be the rocket fuel that takes DeFi more mainstream.So, we are now at a point in time when not one, but so many new technologies are maturing and accelerating faster in capability. In my previous article, I wrote about the launch of Nvidia’s supercomputer, DIGITS, which is 1,000 times more powerful than a laptop costing about the same. Photonic computing could also increase computer processing speeds by over 30 times. Meanwhile, DeepSeek, a Chinese AI company, has showed that you don’t need so much compute to run models as powerful as any others out there.It is the combination of the acceleration in all these technology capabilities that is creating an inflection point for transformational innovation. I believe our future is rapidly heading towards a world where we are without technology constraints, a world where processing power, storage, bandwidth, intelligence, and indeed every aspect of technology is limitless.So, I ask myself again, what does such a world mean for a bank or fintech that already has a legacy estate of technology? The answer is clear: they have to move off their legacy tech or gradually become more irrelevant before their inevitable demise.While many banks will have considered how they can eat the elephant of moving off legacy before, even here technology has made great strides and potentially provides the answer. Solutions like Digital Orchard leverage AI to identify areas of code that could be separated and rewritten while maintaining existing interfaces. And indeed, some companies are already leveraging AI to write new code as well.This week, I’m just saying that to keep up with innovation, the minimum banks and fintechs have to do is to move onto technology that gives you the maximum flexibility and agility to change direction
Ven. Gen 31st, 2025
