Buterin, Innovation And Very Smart Wallets

Ethereum
ETH
founder Vitalik Buterin is someone I always listen to, so I read with interest his recent comment about how innovation is “so often about combining two existing ideas together in a new way”. He gave the example of the combination of digital wallets and artificial intelligence as a locus for such innovation and I have to say that I agree with him. I think we are indeed heading a world of very smart wallets. By this I mean wallets with interfaces to associated intelligent agents to take care of transactions that are too boring (eg, paying for car parking) or too baffling (eg, deciding whether to put spare money into a tax-efficient cash savings account or one based on equities) for most of us to deal with.

What’s A Wallet For?

I am hardly alone in the view that financial services players need to develop sound wallet strategies as a matter of urgency and they can begin by getting rid of the notion that wallets are about payments. They are not. I share Tom Noyes’ perspective: Wallets will be the centre of consumer trust and interaction with the wider world and, indeed, the pivot between the real and virtual worlds. But what will be in those mass-market population-scale digital wallets that will be so central to work, rest and play in the not-too-distant future?