Paper 01 · The direction

Banking Rewired: Reimagining the Future of Banking in a Protocol-Driven World

Four strategic shifts redefining the future bank, and the move from platform thinking to protocol thinking.

Deepak Aggarwal · Posted 17 December 2025 · 16 pages
SSRN 5878263 · DOI 10.2139/ssrn.5878263

What this paper argues

Banking is moving from platforms to protocols. Money flows, credit adjusts, identity streams and consent is calculated ambiently — the question is no longer how digital an institution is, but how programmable, ethical and modular it is.

The paper sets out four strategic shifts redefining the future bank, and identifies the direction of travel that the later papers in the series react to: programmable institutions coordinating trust at scale, compliance embedded in process, and the monetisation of identity and consent.

This is the first paper in the replayability arc. It establishes the direction; The Irrecoverable Institution shows what breaks inside a single institution, and When the Protocol Decides shows what breaks when programmable institutions interconnect.

Terms used here are defined once in the glossary: Decision Engineering™

Start with one decision

Name an important decision made in the last ninety days that your institution could not fully replay today — the rule that applied, the data that was live, the authority that permitted it.