The Impact Of AI On Financial Services: The Three Body Problem

Trying to predict the unpredictable future of financial market infrastructure.

Dateline: Woking, 23rd December 2024.

You’ve probably heard of the “Three Body Problem”, the outstanding Chinese future fiction novel by Liu Cixin or maybe you saw the Netflix series based on the book. The three body problem in the title is a real problem in physics: the motion of two bodies can be calculated with precision but adding a third body introduces unpredictable chaos. With the arrival of non-human financial services customers just around the corner, I think we are about to see a similar dance in the universe of retail financial services. We can take some reasonable guesses about the impact of some technologies, but when we attempt to predict the impact of AI on products and services where we have not three bodies interacting, but three bots interacting—the bank bot, the regulator bot and (soon) the customer bot—things look very complicated indeed.