Why platforms (not neobanks) will reshape banking in the age of AI

We’re at the beginning of a big shift in banking. This shift has something to do with AI, but it’s much more than just AI. We’re entering the era of AI-enabled bank infrastructure platforms which will change the shape and economics of banking.

While the neobank era showed how to improve customer experiences, it did nothing to disrupt incumbent banks and banking economics. If anything, incumbent banks are stronger today than ever.

The coming AI platform era will change banking more profoundly but far less visibly. AI-enabled bank infrastructure platforms will change how banks work not just look. They will collapse operational cost, automate decisioning, and rewire how banks actually run.

This new era won’t produce hundreds of new banks. It will produce a small number of deeply embedded infrastructure platforms that run banks. These platforms will strengthen the benefits of bank incumbency, especially for smaller banks, giving them equivalent capability and cost structure as the world’s largest banks.

The end of the neobanking moment

The world’s greatest neobanks all emerged within space of a few years from 2013 to 2015. Names like Revolut, Nubank, Monzo, Starling, Chime, Cash App and Airwallex.

These neos promised to disrupt banking by rebuilding around the customer. Clean interfaces. Fast onboarding. No branches. No paperwork. No friction.

Customers signed up in droves. Today Nubank has 120 million customers. Revolut and Cash App have 60 million customers each. Chime has 25 million and Monzo 15 million. These are extraordinary numbers. Investors were rightly delighted.

Based on customer numbers alone, you’d assume these neobanks fundamentally disrupted the banking industry and are now set on a path of global dominance.

But the reality is different.

Experience is not the same as disruption

The global neobanks are amazing companies. But they’re better understood as customer experience companies, rather than banks. Neobanks optimised the look of banking and lifted the bar around customer experience.

But in other respects, the neobanks barely made a ripple on the surface of global banking, let alone disrupted incumbents.

Let’s look at the metrics.

Asset size is the classic measure of a bank’s size and importance. The world’s largest banks like JPMorgan Chase or Bank of America have around US$4 trillion in assets each. To qualify in the top 100 banks in the world, a bank needs around US$300 billion in assets.

However, the world’s largest neos are dramatically smaller. Nubank has around US$60bn of assets, which places it around #500 of the world’s largest banks. Revolut, Monzo and Starling all have US$20bn of assets, which places them around #800-900.

In other words, the world’s leading neobanks are roughly the size of a mid-tier regional bank in the US or Australia. Nubank, for instance, is a little bit smaller than Bank of Queensland or Bendigo Bank.

Revenue size is another lens. What’s interesting is that, even in the UK, in many ways the global home of neobanking, Monzo, Starling and Revolut together account for much less than 1% of UK banking revenue. It’s even more stark in the US where neobanks account for only a tiny percentage of US banking revenue.

In other words, neobanks excelled at customer growth, digital adoption and marketing, but it’s striking just how small and undisruptive they’ve been as banks.

Why platforms will reshape banking

While incumbent banks have defended and grown revenue over the past decade, costs are another story. Over the same period, incumbent banks have steadily increased cost-to-serve. They’ve accumulated layers of people, process and systems to manage risk, compliance, operations and exceptions. Banks often spend up to 60% of their costs on people in middle and back-office functions.

Most incumbent banks will not solve this cost problem themselves. Their existing systems are too complex. Their data is too fragmented. Their cultures are too ingrained. AI cannot be dropped into their tech and operations environments and expected to perform miracles.

But modern AI-enabled bank platforms will allow incumbent banks to do just this: completely reshape their cost structure and simplify operational complexity using AI. These platforms won’t just enable incremental efficiency gains, but order-of-magnitude changes in how banks are run.

Constantinople is a good example. Unlike traditional SaaS point solutions, Constantinople runs banks end-to-end using software and AI, supporting all product, tech, ops and compliance. It replaces dozens of fragmented systems of record with a single platform and canonical data model. It embeds agentic AI directly into operational workflows and delivers compliance and auditability by design. Constantinople solves the same underlying problem for many banks at once, creating reusable primitives across KYC, financial crime, fraud and credit decisioning.

The opportunity for smaller banks

Modern platforms like Constantinople offer a particularly important opportunity for smaller banks.

Smaller banks often win on customer relationships, local knowledge and focus. But structurally, they are disadvantaged. They struggle to match major banks on tech investment, specialist talent and operational scale. Over time, this gap has widened — and in the age of AI, it will widen further if each bank continues to build and operate its own capabilities independently.

Modern bank infrastructure platforms like Constantinople change this dynamic by collapsing the cost and complexity of running a bank toward a common floor. By centralising the commoditised and undifferentiated aspects of banking, these platforms allow smaller banks to access the same underlying capability and cost structure as the world’s largest incumbents, without giving up their customer relationships, balance sheets or licences through merger.

Platforms like Constantinople won’t result in a proliferation of new banks, nor a weakening of incumbency. It’s the opposite. Platforms will reinforce incumbency by removing structural disadvantages while preserving differentiation. In the age of AI, advantage in banking will shift away from those who can afford the largest tech and ops teams, and toward those who can best serve customers, deploy capital and manage risk — supported by platforms that quietly run the bank in the background.