Money has become software
A simple tap to pay sets off an extraordinary chain of events. In a matter of seconds, your identity is checked, your balance is confirmed, fraud controls are applied, and a payment instruction moves between institutions that may never have interacted before. Most of the time, it all happens quietly. You get your coffee and carry on with your day.
Money has become software. Trust used to sit more visibly in the branch, the signature and the relationship with a manager who knew your name. Today, much of it sits inside systems most customers will never see. Increasingly, some of the judgement within those systems is being handed to AI.
That raises questions that are not only technical. Who is accountable when an algorithm declines a customer? How much convenience should a bank trade for control? What capabilities should it build itself, and where should it rely on others? And which decisions should remain firmly with people, no matter how capable the technology becomes?
I have spent my career where business and technology meet, often helping each side understand the other. I am not a banker, and I am not quite a pure technologist either. But that space in between is a useful place to observe how technology is changing the way financial services work—and the choices that still need human judgement.
What to expect
This publication sits at the intersection of technology, money, trust and organisational change.
I’ll explore how technology is reshaping the way money moves, how trust is built and maintained, and why change is so difficult inside large organisations. Banking will often be the lens, partly because the stakes are high and the underlying systems are often decades old.
Some pieces will focus on technology itself: how AI is finding its place in the real world, the largely invisible infrastructure that keeps modern services running, and why some transformations take hold while others quietly lose momentum.
The most interesting issues are rarely simple problems with simple answers. They are tensions to manage over time: speed and safety, convenience and control, innovation and trust. I’ll try to make those trade-offs easier to see, using diagrams where they help and technical detail where it genuinely changes the conclusion.
From time to time, I’ll also share work from the workbench. I still like building things myself, and some ideas become much clearer once you can see them working.
If one of these tensions feels familiar in your own work or life, I’d be glad to hear about it. Replies come directly to me.
Welcome. I’m glad you’re here.
Yugal
Yugal Kishore writes about money, technology and the decisions that connect them. Views are his own and not those of his employer.