This past October, I attended a panel in New York City for the release of Emmanuel Daniel’s first book: The Great Transition: The Personalization of Finance is Here. Emmanuel Daniel is a singapore-based entrepreneur, journalist and global thought leader within the world of finance. He is perhaps best known for launching the Asian Banker Summit, one of the largest annual meetings for commercial banks in the region.
In his book, Daniel outlines how the banking industry is undergoing a transition from the platform era to the “Personalization of Finance.” He highlights the role that technologies such as Crypto and Blockchain will play in this transition, and how financial institutions and markets will be forced to adjust in the network age. While the book is about banking and finance, it also explores more holistically a future where everything becomes “financialized.” With each day, the value of an asset becomes less about the asset itself, and more about the data attached to that asset.
Tracing the Transition Towards Personalization
Before I engaged with the text, I found myself wondering what exactly the word “personalization” means. The title “the great transition” certainly invokes excitement by suggesting some momentous change… but the word “personalization” was not one with which I could obviously derive meaning. Before opening the book, one may also wonder: “why does a book about finance have a melting ice cube on the front cover?” These two things, incidentally, operate hand in hand.
Daniel theorizes an ongoing transition in the world of finance that operates analogously to a previous transition that occurred in a now defunct industry: the ice trade. I found this example to be quite compelling, aside from being a neat historical reference.
Ice used to be harvested in ponds and lakes in the North and traded by ice merchants throughout the world. In this old industry, ice merchants were the intermediaries, controlling the flow of ice so that it may eventually end up in a cocktail glass in Havana. The trade peaked at the end of the 19th century and eventually collapsed, in part due to the invention of chlorofluorocarbons. Colloquially referred to as freon, this compound enabled consumers to conveniently and safely manufacture their own ice from the comfort of their own home — within their refrigerator.
We might understand this as being the personalization of the ice cube.
Indeed, certain technologies can precipitate a transition, which impacts not only business and industry, but the world more broadly. In this case, consumers transitioned from buying ice through the ice trade to producing it at home, largely cutting out the ice merchants in the process. By the time freezers were commercially available, this simply made the most sense for consumers.
And so, if freon was the technological innovation that shook up the the ice trade, what future innovations may lead (or are leading) to a shake up within financial services ? Daniel’s thesis asserts that the advent the likes of cryptocurrencies, AI, Blockchain, IoT and 5G have the potential to reimagine the financial industry, disintermediating the “ice merchants” of finance in the process, and allowing for a greater degree of personalization. If today, we operate by using a number of different platforms — tomorrow we will each become the platform owner.
Personalization goes even beyond mere business or technological concepts. It is not just about the ability of technology to change the life of the consumer or impact society. The significance of the ice trade story goes beyond the notion that a technology can disrupt legacy industry, so as to allow you to make your own ice at home. There is a broader theme in these transitions, which he lays out in chapter one…
“The personalization of technology, business, the economy, finance, and society itself are all expressions of the continued march of civilization towards a realization of the full potential of the individual.”
– Emmanuel Daniel
From his perspective, humanity is unshakable in its pursuit of optimizing the individual experience. Although there are roadblocks ahead, and the platform era may still run its course for some time, we have already embarked on a future towards personalization in the financial realm. This future, however it may come about, is inevitable.
Thanks for taking the time to read this short book review. If you have read, or are reading (I would highly suggest this compelling, if difficult, book), I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments!