I was invited onto The Fintech Times News & Views Podcast to react to the AA launching instant savings accounts through NatWest’s banking-as-a-service platform, NatWest Boxed.
On the surface, it looks like a roadside assistance company moving into banking.
In reality, it is a bank extending its distribution into a trusted ecosystem it could not build itself.
Partnerships like these give banks incremental customer growth, but rarely transformational returns. Conversion is uneven, acquisition costs are high and regulatory expectations still follow the programme.
The more strategic opportunity for brands like the AA is to become platforms — aggregating multiple financial providers within their ecosystems rather than distributing a single bank’s product.
From there, the discussion moved into AI, where the shift is far more structural.
Much of what I outlined in The Great Transition — the personalisation of finance and the shift of power to the customer — is now unfolding through agentic AI. Customers will increasingly build their own financial interfaces, instructing transactions across institutions without relying on bank apps.
We discussed:
- Embedded finance as a bank distribution strategy.
- Economics and sustainability of banking-as-a-service.
- Platform opportunities for trusted consumer brands.
- AI shifting interface ownership to customers.
- Agentic AI and customer-built banking access.
- Tokenisation and stablecoins overtaking CBDCs.
- Persistent friction in cross-border payments.
Banking is not disappearing — it is receding into the background of platforms and AI-driven ecosystems.
The real battle will not be over who owns the balance sheet, but who owns the interface through which money moves.
🎧 Listen to the full podcast conversation below.
