The bank the world needs next

The new era of money

For decades, we've had digital representations of money: databases tracking balances, payment messages moving between banks, ledgers tracking debits and credits. But this didn’t represent the digitisation of money itself; these were always just digital records of what remained a fundamentally analogue set of artifacts.

What's happening now is different. Stablecoins have moved from the periphery of the financial system to core infrastructure. They have real transaction volumes and strong regulatory backing. Central banks are building digital currencies. The entire financial system is being rewired at the protocol layer. We're moving from a world where code represents money to a place where code is money.

At the same time, we’re moving to a world in which AI agents are able to act with increasing autonomy. This isn’t a future that’s evenly distributed; some people are running a thousand Openclaw agents at once instead of having an engineering function in their company, while others are still just using AI to get tips for holiday‍—‌but the direction and velocity of travel is clear. We’ve cleared the point at which AI is limited to being an assistant with a human in the loop.

These two generational platform shifts are converging. We’re witnessing the dawn of an era in which code represents both economic value (money) and the actors on the financial system (contracts and agents).

The result is a financial system where machines move money between machines, at machine speed, with humans only in the loop where absolutely necessary. Money no longer changes hands. It moves between systems.

The inevitability of banking

Every platform shift creates new nodes and new types of value. The internet created e-commerce. Mobile created the app economy. Cloud created SaaS. Each time, people questioned whether existing institutions would survive. In general, those that made the platform shift survived, while those that didn’t atrophied and perished.

Banking is different: by pooling short-term deposits into long-term loans, banks serve as a key engine of monetary and economic policy. Countries with strong banking sectors grow faster. It is impossible to separate banking’s economic value as a business from its political value to the nations that sponsor it.

Even in a platform shift as profound as this one, banking isn’t going anywhere. But it raises the question: what type of bank thrives in this new world?

The new world needs a new mode of banking

Banks have been running the same basic playbook since the Medici opened their ledgers six centuries ago in Florence: take deposits, lend money, move funds…and make some money while doing it. It's worked spectacularly well. In 2024, banks globally generated $1.2 trillion in profits, making it the most profitable industry in all of human history.

But the operating model behind that playbook was designed for a world of human actors. What’s happening now, with code as actor, asset and system is fundamentally different. Even the neobanks and the “digital banking” experiences of the last decade are little more than a fresh lick of paint on the same building.

The demand for banking is as potent as it has always been. But who delivers it, and how, is about to fundamentally change.

The systems bank

The fintech era proved finance could be faster and more accessible. But it was, in many ways, papering over the cracks on the old architecture. Talk to any fintech and they'll share the horror stories of dealing with their banking partners‍—‌it's part of why we started Griffin in the first place.

And fintechs were just the precursor. The new world‍—‌the entire new world, not just fintechs‍—‌requires a bank where systems capabilities and API connectivity aren’t just an afterthought‍—‌they’re the thing that matters most.

That’s exactly what we’ve been building. We're not middleware over someone else's bank. Everything at Griffin has been built from the ground up‍—‌from the core banking system to the governance framework‍—‌to enable us to think and act at a systems level, at speed.

We’re still very early in this new world, but we’re seeing it play out in practice. Today, we work with companies using stablecoins at scale for cross-border payments and remittances. We've built an MCP server that lets AI agents engage directly with our API to manage accounts and move money. We're powering enterprises like Uber and Marqeta, as well as dozens of startups and scaleups‍—‌all of whom think of us as an API-first systems partner, not just as a bank.

No fate but what we make

Stablecoins were a curiosity six years ago;, AI agents were science fiction four years ago. The pace of change has not been linear. Banking‍—‌and money itself‍—‌is undergoing a more aggressive change than it has in centuries.

When we started Griffin, it was just Allen and I. We were two devtools nerds for whom the idea of an API-first bank held an inherent aesthetic appeal‍—‌combined with the knowledge that as the world continued to digitise, every person and company in the world would eventually want to have either direct or indirect programmatic control of their banking.

We knew that this control had to be programmatic, because being constrained by their banks’ limited vision for the rich tapestry of people’s relationship to money would never be good enough to let them do what they needed or wanted.

What’s happening now‍—‌the shift of both the application layer to agency and the infrastructure layer to stablecoins‍—‌is like adding petrol to fire, accelerating both demand and capability in a way that “normal” banks will not possibly be able to react to, because they were never building a bank that thought in systems in the first place.

But we were. And we’re ready.