The Future of Finance: How to Build an Abundant Future for All.
We are living through one of the most significant transitions in the history of money and our financial systems, and most of the conversations around it are happening at the wrong register. We're debating tokens and protocols when the real question is about true social trust, meaning, and what we collectively agree has value.
We're in the messy middle where the old infrastructure is aging, the new systems are still half-built, and most of us are somewhere between anxious and oblivious about what comes next. What’s coming next is a skills-based economy, and the future of ambient and general AI will give us new challenges to overcome. With this, a crawl, walk, run approach is useful, because we're not going to leap from fractional reserve banking to some kind of post-scarcity gift economy overnight.
But the crawl phase towards the future of money is real, and it’s happening now. Here are the actions we can take today, during the crawl phase of reimagining money, to help build the foundation for a financial system that actually serves human beings, and not the select few.
1. Reconnect With What You Actually Depend On, Before the Apps Go Down (even for a day)
There's a reason why a bank app outage can hit so hard, even if no money is actually lost. We've built our sense of financial security on access to an interface, not on any grounded understanding of value and exchange at the human scale.
Most of us have no idea what we'd do if the system were to go down for a week because the system has been designed to make that question feel unnecessary. Anthropologists have long noted that the more abstract a society's economic systems become, the more disconnected its members get from the actual material and relational basis of their lives. That disconnection is a vulnerability that’s worth noting.
Action: Map your actual dependencies and your actual resources. Ask yourself: do you have cash? Do you know your neighbours? Do you have skills or goods someone near you genuinely needs? Start a relationship of informal exchange, such as a skill swap, a shared resource, or a standing offer, with someone in your immediate community. This isn't prepper logic but about the rediscovery of what economists have always known: value lives in relationships, not just accounts. Building even one thread of that relational economy into your life is a small but meaningful act of resilience, and a preview of what a more distributed financial future could actually feel like.
2. Get Curious About the Infrastructure, Not Just the Interface
Most of us interact with the financial system entirely at the level of the app. We tap, we transfer, we check the balance, and that's it. But underneath those smooth, frictionless surfaces is an aging infrastructure, contested architecture, and a set of design decisions made decades ago by people with specific interests and assumptions. The conversation about what comes next, perhaps open banking, stable coins and other digital currencies and decentralised finance, is happening right now, and it largely excludes the everyday person, not because they're unwelcome, but because they've never been invited in. That has to change.
Action: Read one piece of serious writing about financial infrastructure this month, and not a crypto hype piece, not a fear piece, something that actually explains how the current system works and what the alternatives are proposing (and not as investment opportunities).
The goal isn't to become an expert. It's to develop enough fluency to have an opinion, because the decisions being made right now about who controls payment rails, what surveillance capabilities get embedded in digital currencies, and how open banking actually gets implemented will shape the next generation of financial life. Informed citizens make better advocates, and better advocates make better policy.
3. Practise the Meaning Behind the Exchange, Not Just the Mechanism
A strange cultural observation we’ve seen is that we've built increasingly frictionless payment systems at exactly the moment when we've most lost touch with what exchange actually means. Tap. Done. The transaction is so fast, so invisible, that the relationship it carries disappears entirely.
The anthropologist Marcel Mauss spent his career documenting the way that all exchange, such as gifts, trades and market transactions, all carry social meaning and obligation. That meaning doesn't disappear because we've digitised the process. It just gets buried, and when meaning gets buried, what's left is abstraction. We see our digital numbers going up, numbers going down, with no felt sense of what they represent.
Action: Introduce one practice of intentional, meaningful exchange into your life. It might be as simple as using cash for one regular purchase a week, and not for the sake of nostalgia, but to feel the directness of something physically changing hands. It might be giving a genuine gift with no expectation of return, in the old anthropological sense, like a contribution to someone's life because you care about the relationship. It might be paying a local maker at a price that reflects the actual value of their work, not the race-to-the-bottom price the platform suggests. These small acts are not naive, but a practise in remembering that exchange is fundamentally a social act, and that memory is the foundation of any financial system worth building.
4. Hold the Builders and Regulators to a Human-Centred Standard
The people designing the next generation of financial infrastructure, such as the technologists, the founders, and the policymakers, are making decisions right now that will determine who gets access, who gets excluded, and who holds power in the systems to come. Decentralisation is only meaningful if it actually distributes power, and open banking is only meaningful if everyday people can genuinely use it. We believe here that central bank digital currencies and stablecoins/other non-crypto digital currencies are worth watching closely, but with particular scrutiny around what surveillance capabilities they embed and who controls them. The history of financial innovation is littered with tools that promised democratisation and delivered concentration. The technology alone doesn't answer the question of whose interests it serves. We do.
Action: When you encounter a new financial product, platform, or policy proposal, ask one question before you ask about the returns: who does this actually serve, and at what cost to whom? Apply that question to your own choices, in which platforms you use, which banks you support, which founders you fund or follow. And if you're a builder yourself, put the everyday person and not the early adopter, or the high-net-worth individual, at the centre of your mental model before you build a single feature. The most sophisticated system in the world is useless if it excludes the people who need it most. Building with genuine human need at the centre isn't idealism but the only design brief that leads somewhere worth going.
The Journey Ahead
The infrastructure is aging, and the alternatives are partial and contested. Our social agreements underneath our financial systems are under more pressure than most people realise. But the future is already visible from here, with open banking frameworks that give individuals genuine control over their financial data, digital currencies designed with transparency and accountability built in, token-based systems that enable circular economies and transparent supply chains, and AI-embedded infrastructure that makes financial participation possible for people currently locked out. These aren't fantasies, and they're already being built, in pieces, by people who've asked the right questions.
What determines whether the future actually serves human beings, rather than replicating the old concentrations of power in new architecture, is whether enough of us are paying attention and building our own clarity about what we want.
The future of money is not a technology question but a question about what we value, who gets to say so, and what kind of social fabric we want to build our agreements on top of. Every small act of intentional exchange, every question asked of a policymaker, every community relationship built before the app goes down, isn’t a small thing. They are the foundation that, if built carefully, determine everything that can stand on top of them.