I was asked by one of the VCs at Founder Institute this question, a while back: Biggest disrupter to Financial Services in the next 10 years?
Start with this: the current system is centralized, opaque, and inefficient. It's built for a world where a few institutions control everything—access, information, outcomes. That doesn’t scale well in a digital, fast-moving world.
Disruption comes when technology cuts out the middlemen and redistributes access. In finance, that’s already happening. The biggest driver? Decentralized finance (DeFi).
DeFi replaces banks, brokers, and clearinghouses with smart contracts and open protocols. It’s trustless, transparent, and global. The core idea: you don’t need permission to participate. You don’t need to trust an institution—you trust the math.
Think about lending. Today, it's gated! think about: credit scores, banks, documentation. In DeFi, you can access lending markets with just a wallet and internet. No gatekeepers. No cut taken by intermediaries. Just code doing the work.
The tech still has a way to go. It’s early, like Bitcoin in 2012, when you;d laugh if your friend asked you to buy. Anyway, usability, scalability, and security all need work. But that’ll get solved. Once it becomes as easy to use as a banking app, the shift will accelerate.
The real bottleneck is regulation. Governments and banks have a lot to lose. They’ll push back hard. But decentralized systems are hard to regulate because they don’t exist in one place. That’s the point. Once adoption hits a critical mass, there’s no going back.
The larger shift here is philosophical. The old financial system runs on institutional trust. That trust is eroding. People are looking for systems that are transparent by design, not enforced by policy. DeFi offers that.
There’s also a macro trend: the rise of the creator economy, microtransactions, remote work. The existing system doesn’t serve that well. Cross-border payments, small dollar flows—it’s all slow and expensive. DeFi handles it better.
So if you’re asking what’s going to reshape finance, it’s not a sleeker app or a marginally better digital currency. It’s a fundamental rewiring of how financial systems operate—permissionless, decentralized, and global.
That’s the bet. And it won’t just be a big disruption -- it’ll be a complete shift in how financial power works, which is where nation states are moving toward.