The original call
Original year: 2019
2026 assessment
Scorecard verdict: Live / too early
Live, but too early — and partly off. The “ownership to access” shift is real (subscriptions, leasing, shared mobility), and embedded short-term credit like BNPL has exploded. But “most banks are now just short term lending institutions” overstates it. As of 2026 the big banks are very much still in the mortgage and long-term lending business, and the great generational wealth transfer is making the advisory and wealth side bigger, not smaller. I had the direction right and the magnitude wrong. The target date was 2030, so the clock is still running — but I would not bet on banks collapsing into pure short-term utilities by then.