Final Thoughts on Bank 3.0: What Brett King Got Right and Wrong
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)
And that’s the whole book.
Fourteen chapters of Brett King arguing that banking was about to fundamentally change. Written in 2013, before most people had a mobile banking app, before “fintech” became a word you heard at every dinner party, and before neobanks started popping up like coffee shops.
So after going through the entire thing, chapter by chapter, what’s the verdict?
What King Got Right
Quite a lot, actually.
Mobile became the dominant banking channel. This was King’s biggest bet and he nailed it. He predicted that mobile would surpass every other channel in usage. Today, most people interact with their bank exclusively through their phone. Branch visits are rare. Even logging into a desktop banking site feels old-fashioned.
Branches shrank dramatically. King predicted that half of US branches could close by 2020. The exact number was more like 15-20% by 2020, but then COVID hit and accelerated closures hard. The trend was right even if the timeline was optimistic.
Traditional marketing stopped working for banks. His chapter on contextual marketing was spot-on. Direct mail response rates cratered. Newspaper and TV advertising lost effectiveness. Banks that figured out digital marketing, behavioral targeting, and permission-based outreach gained a real edge.
Fintech companies ate into banking’s territory. PayPal, Square, Venmo, and dozens of others did exactly what King warned about. They took specific pieces of banking and did them better, faster, and with less friction. Banks that ignored this got left behind.
The “de-banked” population grew. King talked about people leaving traditional banks for prepaid cards, PayPal accounts, and alternative financial services. This continued and expanded. The “underbanked” and “unbanked” populations became major topics, and fintech companies built entire businesses serving people that traditional banks ignored.
Customer experience became the battleground. King argued that convenience was the number one driver and that banks needed to remove friction from every process. He was absolutely right. The banks that made account opening take 5 minutes on a phone won. The ones that still required branch visits and paper forms lost customers.
Social media reshaped the bank-customer relationship. His prediction that social media would become more important than call centers for customer engagement came true. Banks that engaged on Twitter (and later other platforms) built loyalty. Banks that ignored social media or tried to suppress it paid the price.
What King Got Wrong (Or At Least Missed)
No book about the future gets everything right. Here’s where things went differently than King expected.
The death of cash was slower than predicted. King was very bullish on the end of physical currency. And while cash usage has declined, it’s still very much alive. Even in 2019, cash accounts for a significant percentage of transactions globally. COVID pushed things more digital, but cash proved stubborn, especially in developing economies and among older populations.
NFC mobile payments took forever. King was excited about NFC (near-field communication) for mobile payments. It took years longer than anyone expected. Google Wallet (later Google Pay) struggled. Apple Pay didn’t launch until 2014 and took years to reach critical mass. The vision was right but the adoption curve was much slower.
He underestimated regulatory friction. King acknowledged regulation but generally treated it as something that would adapt to innovation. In reality, regulation became one of the biggest obstacles to the changes he predicted. Banking licenses, compliance requirements, KYC rules, and data privacy laws (GDPR, CCPA) slowed things down significantly. Some of his “this will happen in five years” predictions took ten or more partly because of regulatory reality.
Privacy backlash was bigger than expected. The contextual, data-driven marketing King advocated requires a lot of personal data. He mentioned privacy concerns briefly but didn’t give them much weight. In practice, the fight over data privacy became one of the defining tech battles of the decade. Customers wanted personalization but also didn’t want to feel surveilled.
Some of his favorite startups didn’t make it. King mentioned Simple, Movenbank, and others as examples of the future. Simple was acquired by BBVA and eventually shut down. Movenbank (later Moven) pivoted several times. The specific companies didn’t always survive, even if the ideas they represented did. The fintech landscape turned out to be more brutal than the book suggested.
He didn’t predict the crypto/blockchain disruption. To be fair, Bitcoin was barely a thing in 2013 and DeFi didn’t exist. But the entire cryptocurrency and blockchain movement became a massive factor in the “future of banking” conversation that King’s book simply couldn’t have foreseen.
The Big Takeaways
After reading all 14 chapters, a few themes stick:
1. Behavior drives everything. The most important insight in the book isn’t about any specific technology. It’s that customer behavior is the force that reshapes industries. Once people started doing banking on their phones, everything else had to follow. Technology enables behavior change, but behavior change forces institutional change.
2. Incumbents lose when they defend the past instead of building the future. King’s frustration throughout the book is with banks that kept doubling down on branches, paper, and old processes. The ones that survived and thrived were the ones that asked “what do customers actually want?” instead of “how do we keep doing what we’ve always done?”
3. The channel is not the product. Banking isn’t a building. It isn’t a website. It isn’t an app. It’s a set of services that people need. The delivery mechanism should be invisible. The best banking experience is one you barely notice because it just works when you need it.
4. Data is the real asset. Banks have always had massive amounts of customer data. King’s argument that this data is more valuable than branch real estate was proven right many times over. The banks and fintechs that learned to use data well built better products, better marketing, and better customer relationships.
5. Speed matters more than perfection. King’s repeated message to banks: experiment, iterate, try things. Don’t wait for the perfect solution. By the time you’ve finished planning, the market has moved on. This advice was correct and most banks still struggle with it.
Overall Impression
Bank 3.0 is a good book. Not perfect. Some sections are repetitive. King sometimes hammers the same point three different ways when once would do. The statistics are obviously dated (though that’s unavoidable for any book about technology and markets).
But the core thesis was right. Banking did become something you do, not somewhere you go. The shift King described in 2013 is essentially complete for most consumers in developed markets.
What makes the book valuable isn’t the specific predictions. It’s the framework. King’s way of thinking about banking through the lens of customer behavior, channel evolution, and institutional inertia is still useful today. You could apply the same framework to insurance, healthcare, education, or government services and get similar insights.
If you work in financial services and haven’t read this book, it’s worth your time. Not for the statistics (they’re old), but for the thinking. It’ll make you look at your own organization and ask: are we building the future or defending the past?
And if you read it and feel uncomfortable about the answer, that’s probably the point.
This wraps up the Bank 3.0 series. Thanks for reading along. If you found this useful, check out some of the individual chapter posts for deeper takes on specific topics like mobile banking, the future of branches, social media in banking, and the death of cash.