The future of finance isn’t just about banks or currencies anymore. It’s slowly becoming a story about algorithms, data, and control. As artificial intelligence (AI) starts shaping how money is created, moved, and managed, the power dynamics behind the system are quietly shifting. Central banks are testing digital currencies, while Big Tech is pushing deeper into financial services. The real question now isn’t whether change is coming; it’s who ends up in control.
In an exclusive interview with International Finance, Brett King, founder and CEO of The Futurists Network, Fintech Hall of Fame inductee, and policy advisor to global leaders, including the Obama administration, President Xi’s advisory ecosystem, and GCC governments, shares his perspective on how artificial intelligence is reshaping money, power, and the global financial order.
You have long predicted shifts in financial systems. Are we now entering an era where artificial intelligence becomes the core decision-maker in finance rather than human-led institutions?
Yes, we are witnessing the end of human-led decision-making in banking. We are seeing multiple agentic platforms being deployed right now at scale, including OpenClaw, PayPal, Stripe, Mastercard and others. So, it’s fairly inevitable that we’ll need fit-for-purpose banking. This requires agentic finance and native AI capabilities, which will exclude most banks in their current technical state. By 2035, agentic banking will be mainstream as neo-banking is mainstream today.
When we discuss the future of money, is the real transformation about innovation, or about who controls financial power?
There is no future for money as we think of it today. The more automation that is put in the system, the less value fiat currency provides, as it is not machine-readable, nor can it move without human intervention. We need smart money, which will include stablecoins, CBDCs, tokens (deposit, utility, etc), and eventually, AI marketplaces will further iterate on digital money.
As AI begins to drive lending, underwriting, and investment decisions, who ultimately holds accountability, the institution, the algorithm, or the data ecosystem behind it?
The institution will hold responsibility, but we will need both human and AI oversight functions to ensure these algorithms work. Ultimately, the quality of the data will determine how well these decisions can be automated. This is why data lakes and foundation models are really critical in the medium term.
Do you believe algorithmic trust can realistically replace traditional trust in banks, and what risks come with that shift?
Absolutely. Firstly, trust in banks will convert to trust in algorithms over time, just as it did with credit cards online, and online banking. Today, we see neobanks and wallets with higher trust scores than traditional banks, which is a good indication of the path artificial intelligence will take.
Could AI-led finance democratise access to capital globally, or will it deepen the concentration of power among a few dominant players?
Both. The core problem is not the democratisation of capital as much as it is AI’s potential to replace human capital. Which is why we hear many of the tech ‘broligarchy’ talking about Universal Basic Income. The fact is, wealth distribution is the biggest issue for AI at scale moving forward, not access to capital per se. But, at the same time, there will never be an easier time to start your own business or launch a product in the world.
If artificial intelligence becomes the primary gatekeeper of financial access, how do we address the risk of bias and ensure fairness at scale?
We completely need to rethink financial access in this world, but access to AI won’t be restricted by bias. All you will need is an internet connection and a smartphone. By 2030, 99% of the planet will have that capability (projected). The issues with biases are still present in datasets today, but people are self-selecting platforms that focus on accessibility and speed of access. This is why Revolut is now approaching the milestone of being the largest retail bank (by customers) in Europe, and why Ant Group and NuBank have already taken that status in their markets.
With the rise of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs), are governments enhancing efficiency, or expanding control over how money is used?
CBDCs do not give much greater control over how money is used from the account and fraud structures we have today, although they do allow central banks more direct control over the use of the currency and policy mechanisms connected to CBDCs. The key to understanding is that you can’t run autonomous systems on fiat currency on a traditional core – they are not fit for purpose. You can create translation layers and so forth, but CBDCs can be purpose-built to mirror trade agreements, for example, allowing only for cross-border transfers consistent with said agreements – programmable money that is policy and process enforced. This allows for much greater use of safety rails and mechanisms on autonomous cross-border trade that we don’t have with fiat. Various players, such as the CEO of Circle, have said we’ll likely have to move to rollback models over time, so that current payment rails don’t support either. So, this is all fit-for-purpose money design.
How concerned should we be about the idea of programmable money being used to influence or restrict economic behaviour?
Again, the banks can restrict money from an individual account to entire countries right now, today. So, this is not the systemic risk it would appear to be. Remember, we will need the ability to stop agentic AI-based criminal organisations using AI to scale crime, which we cannot do with today’s rails and account structures. So, we are actually at much greater risk of fraud and crime without programmable money.
Do CBDCs have the potential to genuinely improve financial inclusion, or could they unintentionally weaken the role of commercial banks?
We are already seeing the impact of potential yield from stablecoins being a big destabilising element for traditional deposits, but CBDCs essentially allow anyone with a government ID to have access to basic banking services. So, the answer is, both will happen simultaneously.
Between banks, Big Tech, and governments, which entity do you believe is best positioned to dominate the future financial ecosystem, and why?
The two determinants of success in this world are speed and technical agility. Speed will be defined by your organisation’s culture (how quickly artificial intelligence can be integrated), your tech stack, and how much of it is AI-ready. Banks with on-premise mainframes without access to the cloud or without multi-year digital transformation experience will really suffer through this transition, as they will quickly become less relevant from a systemic perspective. The other issue is market share and those natural shifts. Today, digital banks like NuBank, Revolut, Starling, Chime and others are dominating in their markets because of their ability to acquire customers at scale. AI is going to supercharge that capability, and banks reliant on traditional distribution will simply continue to lose customers pretty rapidly.
For example, HSBC, one of the world’s top 20 banks since the 1980s, has 38 million customers globally. And that has remained stable for the last decade, but Revolut has already hit 70 million in that same timeframe. Next, we will see how AI advisory shifts AuM to digital platforms away from product-based banks.
Are we moving toward a model where banks become invisible infrastructure while technology companies own the customer interface?
Yes, absolutely. Banks are either going to be data stores or data pipes, but they won’t own the personal AI clients at the front end. This is a bigger shift than most people realise. In 10 years, you’ll interact with your AI, and it will execute on your banking and money management, health management, all the administrative elements of your life – you won’t use apps. Interfaces will essentially be liquid/generative, sort of chunks of functionality driven by context and the AI. So, you won’t use banking apps like you do today. Your personal AI agent will interact with the bank agent on your behalf. Only when it needs your input will you get something resembling an interaction with a bank today, but it will be minimal.
Do regulators today have the capability to effectively oversee AI-driven financial systems, or are they already falling behind innovation?
Regulators need to be aware of the technology infrastructure in the future. Humans will simply not be able to supervise an AI-based system of this complexity and the speed of artificial intelligence. Most regulators are falling behind, but likely, regulation will start to coalesce into regulatory zones with common policy/process and infrastructure requirements. You need agentic regulation to run agentic banking, not human-based regulation. Also, policy will need to be a feedback loop process, where the data shows trends, the agent model and guardrails are tweaked, and the code is refined. We won’t be going to the Senate or Parliament to enact policy like we do today – it will all be in code.
Could artificial intelligence and digital currencies accelerate a shift in global financial power away from traditional economic leaders?
Yes, but likely, China will lead the world in terms of the adaptiveness of their economy from an embedded AI/Autonomous finance perspective, just because of the level of investment they are making in infrastructure, including next-generation energy systems and distributed edge compute.
Where is the US falling short today in terms of preparing for this future?
The big oil/gas lobby has restricted renewables deployment in the US, which leaves the US grid under immense strain as automation demands for energy grow. Secondly, the US remains the only G20 country to not have a dedicated fintech charter and widespread real-time payments adoption. Both would be required in the near term.
In an AI-first world, how do you see the very definition of money evolving; will it remain a static store of value, or become a dynamic, programmable asset?
Data will be the new money in many ways. For example, in the mid 2030s, expect longevity to be a big theme for the developed world. Your health data becomes just as valuable as money in that scenario. Thus, the question is how data and money work together in this new system. The reality is that the more automation we put into the world, the less utility money itself will have. It’s highly unlikely that in 60 years we’ll use money at all in most parts of the world.
Could we see a future where AI agents transact, invest, and manage money autonomously on our behalf, and what does that mean for human control over finance?
Absolutely. Control is overrated. Efficiency of capital deployment, maximisation of returns and minimisation of risk are far more critical, and this is where artificial intelligence will excel, and outperform humans consistently and absolutely. Just like you won’t trust a doctor not using AI in a few years’ time, you won’t trust a bank that doesn’t use AI to manage your money in the future.
Are we heading toward a fragmented global financial system driven by competing digital currencies and geopolitical tensions?
We are already in a multipolar geopolitical world. In one of my reports, I have described the impact of the Iran war and general large-scale systems automation. Ian Bremmer, a highly regarded political commentator out of NYC, talks about the technology cold war we are entering into between the US tech giants and distributed Chinese tech. By 2050, the largest economies in the world will be smart economies, managed by AI. Extremely resource efficient, by today’s standards, but much more energy dependent – this is why the US is not likely to win this in the long term.
What’s the biggest unspoken risk in AI-led financial systems that policymakers may be underestimating today?
Ethics. It is hard to code ethical guardrails into AI because we can’t even agree on ethics as humans. Take issues like abortion, transgender kids, vaccines, etc – how do you manage the ethics of those issues in AI when humans themselves can’t find agreement.
What is one prediction about the future of money that most people underestimate today, but will soon become reality?
Artificial intelligence is the end of capitalism as we know it. AI has one central tenet in respect to its design — that is to automate at scale, eliminating human labour wherever possible. The most efficient business is a human-less corporation. Sam Altman talks about the single-person unicorn as a fact yet to be confirmed, but totally possible. The US Fed chairman has already said AI is eliminating hirings for entry-level positions across the S&P 500 today. This put us on a trajectory where AI generates massive technology unemployment fairly quickly globally. If you have large-scale unemployment due to AI, the basic tenets of capitalism no longer work. That’s why we hear proposals for Universal Basic Income and other things as ways to keep consumers consuming in an AI world. We need new, flexible thinking on our economic and policy models that isn’t simply capitalism versus socialism. We need new types of systems thinking to adapt to this.