There is a single slide I often return to when working with boards and executive teams on the future of banking. It is deceptively simple. Five sentences. Centuries of human and financial evolution compressed into one arc.
I first encountered it through Chris Skinner’s work, and I continue to credit him for its clarity. What makes the slide enduring is not its cleverness, but its discipline. It forces us to see finance not as products and platforms, but as a reflection of how societies organize themselves.
Over time, the relationship between money and human coordination has evolved in clear, observable phases.
1- Nomadic societies relied on bartering, because value was immediate, local, and transient.
2- Agrarian societies introduced cash, enabling storage of value across seasons and surplus.
3- Industrial societies needed cheques, because commerce outgrew physical exchange and required abstraction.
4- Office-based societies adopted cards, aligning with salaried work, centralized institutions, and standardized consumption.
5- Networked societies moved to chips, as identity, connectivity, and computation became embedded everywhere.
Each shift was not driven by financial innovation alone. It was driven by a change in how humans lived, worked, and trusted at scale.
That is the part many conversations about the future miss.
Why This Model Still Matters
When I use this framework in workshops, I am not asking participants to predict the next payment instrument. I am asking them to recognize a deeper pattern: money evolves when the structure of society evolves.
Financial systems do not lead social change. They crystallize it.
Which is why the question “what comes after chips?” cannot be answered by looking at fintech roadmaps, payment trends, or venture funding cycles alone. It must be answered by asking a more fundamental question:
How are humans reorganizing themselves now?
The Shift Beneath the Shift
Networked societies solved coordination at scale. Chips, digital identity, and embedded payments allow value to move instantly across borders, platforms, and contexts. That phase is still unfolding, but it is no longer novel.
What is changing now is not connectivity, but cognition.
We are entering a period where intelligence (human and machine) is becoming collective, ambient, and continuous. Decisions are no longer made episodically; they are inferred in real time. Trust is no longer binary; it is probabilistic and dynamic. Value is no longer exchanged discretely; it flows contextually.
In this environment, money begins to change again, not in form, but in behavior.
What Comes Next Is Not a New Instrument
Historically, each era produced a dominant financial abstraction. But the next phase may not produce a single, visible artifact at all.
Instead of bartering, cash, cheques, cards, or chips, we are moving toward financial states.
Money becomes less something you “use” and more something that continuously reflects who you are, what you do, and how you interact within networks of trust. Credit is not applied for; it emerges. Payments are not initiated; they are embedded. Risk is not priced periodically; it is sensed and adjusted continuously.
In this sense, the future of finance is not transactional. It is ambient.
Implications for Banks and Institutions
This evolution has profound implications for how financial institutions think about their role.
Banks have historically been custodians of instruments, accounts, and transactions. In the next era, their value will increasingly lie in orchestrating trust, intelligence, and resilience across complex systems.
The institutions that endure will not be those that simply digitize existing products, but those that understand how money behaves when identity, intelligence, and networks converge.
This is not about replacing cash with something else, or cards with something shinier. It is about recognizing that finance itself is becoming less visible, less episodic, and more deeply integrated into everyday life.
A Question Worth Sitting With
When I ask workshop participants what comes after chips, I am not looking for a right answer. I am looking for how they think.
Do they default to technology?
Do they jump to products?
Or do they step back and examine how society itself is changing?
The future of finance will not be decided by those who predict the next tool. It will be shaped by those who understand the next human arrangement that money must serve.
So the question remains open, and it should.
What comes after chips?
What comes after networked societies?
More importantly: what kind of society are we becoming, and what kind of financial system will it require?
That is where the real future of finance begins.
