A few months ago, in an ExCo offsite for a South East Asian bank, I asked a room full of senior leaders a question that sounded almost trivial:

“What is Tesla?“

The room went quiet for a moment. Then the answers started coming, one after another, each delivered with confidence. A car manufacturer. A technology company. A battery business. A data company. An energy platform. A design brand. Someone half-jokingly called it a cult, and a woke movement.

None of them were wrong. And yet, none of them were sufficient.

What struck me wasn’t the variety of answers, but the ease with which Tesla had outgrown a single identity. Different people experienced Tesla differently, depending on where they sat: as drivers, as engineers, as regulators, as investors, or as competitors. Tesla’s ambiguity wasn’t a weakness. It was a consequence of scale, ambition, and systemic reach.

Later that same week, in a very different room, I asked a different audience a different question:

“What is a bank?“

The confidence was even higher. The answers more rehearsed. A regulated financial intermediary. A balance sheet. A lender. A payments provider. A risk manager. A trust institution. Critical national infrastructure.

Again, none of these were wrong. But together, they revealed something more troubling than diversity of opinion. They revealed that banks, like Tesla, no longer have a single, shared understanding of what they fundamentally are.

The difference is that Tesla can afford that ambiguity. Banks cannot.

For most of modern history, a bank’s identity was not something that required debate. It was self-evident. Banks took deposits, extended credit, facilitated payments, managed risk, and sat at the center of the economic system. Regulation defined the perimeter. Branches defined presence. Products defined strategy. The model was stable enough that nobody needed to articulate it.

That world no longer exists.

Today, banks operate in an environment where money moves instantly, competitors emerge from outside the industry, and intelligence is embedded directly into decision-making. Customers no longer experience “the bank” as an institution; they experience fragments of it, often mediated through apps, platforms, and ecosystems the bank does not control. Regulators scrutinize resilience rather than growth. Investors ask whether returns justify capital. Employees question whether the work they do still matters.

In that environment, identity stops being philosophical and becomes operational.

I’ve sat in boardrooms where one director spoke about the bank as national infrastructure, another spoke about it as a technology platform, and a third framed it as a relationship business. Each perspective was valid. Collectively, they explained why strategy conversations often feel circular. When you don’t agree on what you are, you can’t agree on what to build.

This is where the Tesla analogy becomes instructive, not aspirational.

Tesla’s real advantage is not electric motors or minimalist dashboards. It is the clarity of what it is optimizing for. Every design choice, every software update, every data loop reinforces that intent. The intelligence compounds because the identity is coherent.

Banks, by contrast, are sitting on extraordinary reservoirs of data, history, and trust. But data does not compound on its own. It compounds when an institution knows what it exists to decide, not just what it exists to sell.

I often hear debates about whether banking is undergoing incremental change or radical disruption. I think that framing misses the point. The more important shift is not technological. It is existential.

When artificial intelligence begins to outperform humans in routine credit decisions, when payments become invisible, when balance sheets are no longer the only source of leverage, the old definitions start to crack. The question is no longer whether banks are digital, or whether they use AI, or whether they compete with fintechs.

The question is simpler and far more uncomfortable: what is a bank when information, money, and intelligence flow freely?

Some institutions will retreat into regulation, treating compliance as identity. Others will try to cosplay as technology companies, mistaking tools for purpose. Neither path is durable.

The banks that endure will be the ones that articulate, clearly and honestly, the role they play in the system today, not the role they inherited, and not the role they envy, but the role they are structurally positioned to perform. Once that is clear, architecture follows. Operating models follow. Talent decisions become easier. Capital allocation becomes more rational.

Without that clarity, even the strongest balance sheet becomes fragile over time.

So the question I now ask boards is no longer about Tesla.

It is this: what is your bank, really?

Not in marketing language. Not in regulatory language. But in terms of the value you uniquely create and the decisions you are uniquely trusted to make.

That answer, more than any technology roadmap or transformation program, will determine whether your institution remains essential – or simply persists until it isn’t.