How have you seen financial institutions handle digital transformation? Are they getting it right or are they way off in a ditch?

Yeah, I mean, to clarify on the futurist part, I did create a futuristic group.

on a website called shapingtomorrow.com and I got invited to the World Future Society conference and I immediately realized I was in the wrong place when I found myself sitting about what we would do when we had close encounters of the third kind or fourth kind and thought, this is not for me, I'm not talking aliens, guys.

so i'm a commercial strategist what i'm really trying to do is to see what's going to happen next from an opportunity in the market's view and where to invest which is far more near term and with the financial industry in terms of digital i've been arguing for most of my life that banks need to reinvent their architecture and their core systems on a regular basis because most in the Western world, Europe and America, haven't.

The figures will have changed, I'm sure, but Reuters had a figure that 43% of the back office systems of US banks are written in COBOL.

And there's nothing wrong with being written in COBOL, just that no one codes in COBOL anymore.

So you can't find anyone to maintain those systems.

What's an AI use case that banks should probably stop chasing and one that they should be investing in more seriously?

How is a banker supposed to make sense of all this? What do you think is going to be the fundamental technological change that we'll see in banking in the coming decade that we should really learn about or worry about?

I think you should learn about and worry about all technological change.

But I don't.

And the reason I don't is that for the whole of my life, people have said technology is going to replace banks and banks will be destroyed.

And we don't need banking.

Bill Gates, 1996, we need banking, but we don't need banks, was his quote.

And completely wrong.

How do you see this sense of purpose being adopted by the financial industry? And what specific initiatives do you see banks taking in this regard?