The financial stack of the future

Inspired by moderating a brilliant expert panel at Money 20/20 Europe, I wanted to share some thoughts on the future direction of our financial system. These musings are by no means fully formed. But in my role as head of innovation at Swift, I believe it’s our responsibility - as a convenor of the financial community - to articulate these ideas, share them and invite feedback.

Here, I’ll paint a picture of the architecture of the future. How might the worlds of TradFi and DeFi converge? And what could the resulting system look like? Others have attempted to paint such a picture, but too often they start from a blank sheet of paper. Instead, this is an attempt to paint combining the existing and the new. 

My visualisation? A system built on trust, programmability and intelligence that uplifts the experience of every customer, whatever financial service they choose to use. And one in which customers need not think about the financial service at all - just the outcome they wish to achieve.

What changes

Rather than starting with the existing, I think in this time of very rapid change, it’s necessary to start with the new. In our panel, we discussed three forces set to reshape financial services - tokenisation, AI and quantum. Individually, they are all significant. But combined, their potential could be transformational.

Tokenisation

This is where blockchain will finally deliver on its promise.

After over a decade of work, we are reaching institutional adoption. In payments and securities, tokenisation promises both greater efficiency - through 24/7 automated processing - and meaningful new upside, as programmability and composability open the door to fresh use cases.

AI

The home of massive investment and excitement.

It can be difficult to separate the signal from the noise, but the potential from AI agents should not be underestimated. The significance here is that AI agents could provide the ‘intelligence’ to manage the programmability of tokenisation - within defined rules and mandates.

Quantum 

Always the dark horse, Q Day edges closer.

And while the risk from quantum needs to be properly prepared for - as the financial community is doing - there is increasing focus on the potential of quantum to provide the horsepower for complex computational problems. This is evidenced by recent investment in chips and tech startups.

What does this all mean together?

Combined, these three allow us to envisage a future system in which finance is orchestrated by a series of highly performant, quantum-safe, programmable ledgers, managed by many autonomous AI agents.

That is a powerful concept to consider.

What remains

On its own, however, this vision is not enough. It needs to be supported - and this is where the existing system’s skills and experience come into play. There are many ways this can happen, but I will focus on two.

Data

In the new world, the old adage of ‘junk in-junk out’ has not gone away. In fact, it takes on new meaning as questionable AI output is generated at scale and fed back into new models - risking a self-reinforcing cycle. To counter this risk, high-quality, well-structured data will be needed to make this new financial system both sustainable and useful.

Standards

This one is closely linked to the first. 

ISO 20022 is already becoming the common language for payments. And as we move into the future, such evolving data standards will be even more important. 

Standards and market practices have always underpinned the smooth functioning of financial services. But as Jochen Papenbrock of Nvidia noted on our Money20/20 panel, they will need to operate at a much deeper technical level to deliver true interoperability between networks and platforms.

This is central to Swift’s digital standardisation platform initiative and this year’s Swift Hackathon. Yet there is more to do. Payments and securities can learn from computing and telecommunications - where standards are defined and implemented with far greater precision and consistency.

What’s essential: Trust

In all of this, many things will remain constant—and the most important of them is trust. Financial services is built on it. As a customer, I trust an institution to send money to another person because I trust that institution is financially sound, well run, governed and regulated—and that the networks and infrastructures it relies on are managed just as carefully.

In a digital world where convenience increasingly drives choice, that trust is often assumed rather than actively assessed. Yet it is still grounded in authority - earned over many years through experience, oversight and performance. Those people and institutions that have built that trust will need to carry it into the new world.

Contrary to the prophets of decentralisation, I do not believe trust based on authority will disappear. We will still want to know ‘who’ to trust. But ‘how’ we establish that trust is likely to evolve.

In a digital environment, the ‘who’ can be ephemeral—here today, gone tomorrow—and no longer anchored in a physical presence. That makes the ability to verify trust instantly, and in real time, an essential capability.

Always-on, verifiable trust—still grounded in authority—may well define the next phase of financial services.

The outcome

I’m mindful that this could all sound rather theoretical. But taken together, it points to a system that is both more capable and more coherent than today’s - where new technologies and existing foundations work in concert, rather than in competition.

For customers, the benefit is simple. Whichever institution or service they choose, the experience can improve dramatically - becoming more seamless, more responsive and more reliable.

That brings us back to the original idea. Not a system defined by the tools it uses, but by what it enables. One in which customers no longer need to think about the financial service itself, only the outcome they want to achieve.

To get there, though, we don’t need to tear everything down and start again. To misquote a film, ‘we already have everything we need.’