Banks Can't Stop Technology From Changing Everything
Book: Bank 3.0: Why Banking Is No Longer Somewhere You Go But Something You Do Author: Brett King ISBN: 978-1-118-58963-2 Publisher: Wiley (2013)
Chapter 9 is where Brett King goes full tech nerd. And honestly, I’m here for it.
The whole chapter is built around one idea: technology keeps getting better, faster, and cheaper. And banks that pretend this isn’t happening are going to get crushed.
Moore’s Law and Why It Matters to Your Bank Account
King starts with Moore’s Law. In 1965, Gordon Moore predicted that computing power would double roughly every two years. And for decades, that prediction held. The numbers are wild when you lay them out.
In 1971, Intel’s first microprocessor had 2,300 transistors. By 2006, they had chips with 1.7 billion. Your phone today has more computing power than NASA had when they sent people to the moon. Those musical greeting cards that play a tune when you open them? More computing power than all the Allied and Axis forces had combined in World War II.
King uses these examples to make a point that feels obvious now but apparently wasn’t to bank executives in 2012: if computing power keeps doubling while costs keep falling, the tools people use to interact with money will keep changing too. You can’t build your business around today’s technology and expect it to last.
The Singularity Detour
King brings up Ray Kurzweil and the Singularity concept. This is the idea that at some point, machines will become so advanced they’ll be able to improve themselves, leading to an intelligence explosion that changes everything about human life.
Kurzweil’s quote about how what fits in your pocket today will fit inside a blood cell in 25 years is the kind of thing that sounds crazy until you remember people said the same thing about smartphones.
I’ll be honest, the Singularity stuff feels like a detour in a banking book. But King’s real point is about the speed of change. Technology isn’t just improving. The rate of improvement is itself accelerating. And that matters a lot for industries built on stability and slow change. Like banking.
3D Printing and Emailing a Toaster
One of the more fun sections is about 3D printing. King talks about how physical objects are becoming information. Music went digital. Movies went digital. Books went digital. Kurzweil suggested that eventually you could email someone a toaster, because 3D printers would be able to manufacture physical objects from digital files.
In 2012, 3D printers could already print fabrics, circuits, and even human organs. A kidney took about six hours to print using a patient’s own stem cells. King saw this as part of the same pattern: technology doesn’t just change one thing. It changes everything connected to that thing.
For banking, the implication is clear. If entire industries can be disrupted by digital manufacturing, banking is not somehow immune.
Screens Everywhere, Paper Nowhere
A big chunk of the chapter covers display technology. OLED screens, flexible displays, electronic paper, retina displays. King was fascinated by how screens were getting thinner, cheaper, and more capable.
Sony had demo screens thinner than a human hair. Samsung showed phones with foldable displays. Corning was showing off glass that could be a screen. King predicted screens would be built into walls, tables, windows, and furniture within a few years.
He was mostly right. We didn’t quite get screens in every surface, but the trend was real. Digital signage is everywhere now. And the idea that a bank branch might use facial recognition to detect a customer’s age and pitch them relevant products? That’s not science fiction anymore.
Touch, Gestures, and the Death of the Keyboard
King spends time on multitouch and haptic feedback. The iPhone had just shown the world what a touch interface could do. He predicted that physical keyboards and mice would disappear within ten years. Screens would become the entire computing device.
He was partly right. Laptops still have keyboards. But tablets and phones are the primary computing devices for most people. And the banking apps we use every day are built entirely around touch.
The Unilever smile-activated ice cream machine King mentions feels silly, but the underlying tech (facial recognition, interactive displays, real-time personalization) is now standard in retail. Banks that aren’t thinking about these kinds of interactions are already behind.
The Real Message: Adoption Cycles Are Shrinking
Here’s the part that matters most. King lays out how the time it takes for new technology to reach mass adoption keeps getting shorter. Radio took decades. Television was faster. The internet was faster still. Smartphones were even faster.
He drops some great failed predictions. In 1995, a Newsweek columnist wrote that no online database would replace your daily newspaper and buying books over the internet was laughable. In 1997, a Tennessee bank CEO admitted he thought internet banking would never reach rural areas in his lifetime. Bloomberg said in 2007 that the iPhone wouldn’t make a lasting mark on financial services.
Every one of these predictions was wrong. And they were wrong because the people making them underestimated the speed of change.
King’s argument to bankers is brutal and simple: you cannot wait. The customers coming through your doors right now grew up with Facebook and iPhones. They don’t think of these as “new technology.” It’s just life. When your bank doesn’t work the way the rest of their digital life works, they don’t think your bank is traditional. They think it’s irrelevant.
Banks Won’t Disappear, But They’ll Have to Change
King ends with a balanced take. Banks aren’t going away. People still need places to store money, get credit, and manage finances. But the distribution system is being completely rewritten.
PayPal had been around for over a decade and most banks still treated it like a startup. Square was giving every small business a card reader. Simple was trying to build a bank that didn’t feel like a bank. These companies were faster, more adaptable, and more in tune with how people actually behave.
The only way banks survive, King argues, is by becoming great at being digital. Great at being virtual. And most importantly, great at service. Because the new competitors will always be faster at adopting new tech. Banks need to make up for that gap with constant innovation and real customer engagement.
His closing line about “broken records” made me smile. He tells younger readers to ask their grandparents what a broken record is. That’s peak 2012 humor right there.
My Take
This chapter is a tech history lesson wrapped in a warning. Some of the specific predictions are dated (we’re not all using electronic paper newspapers). But the core argument holds up completely. Technology doesn’t slow down for industries that aren’t ready. And the banks that treated digital as a side project instead of the main event have been paying for it ever since.
The speed of change King warned about in 2012 has only gotten faster. If anything, he was being conservative.