The Great Unbundling: When Your Bank Becomes Just Another Utility

Stop and think about your checking account for a moment.

Right now, it's everything. It's where your paycheck hits every two weeks. It's connected to Spotify, Netflix, your gym membership, and that subscription box you forgot to cancel. It's linked to Venmo for splitting dinner. It's the hub of your entire financial existence.

Your checking account is the sun, and everything else in your financial life orbits around it.

Here's the uncomfortable truth: That's about to end.

The Infrastructure Is About to Become Invisible

Tomorrow—and by tomorrow, I mean within the next five years—your checking account will be plumbing. Invisible infrastructure. Commoditized pipes that move money around while you interact with something else entirely.

The checking account won't disappear. It just won't matter.

Think about the last time you cared about which cell tower your phone connected to. Or which fiber optic cable carried your video call. You don't know. You don't care. That's infrastructure. That's plumbing.

That's what checking accounts are becoming.

The interface layer—Venmo, Cash App, Apple Pay, or whatever AI-powered financial orchestration platform emerges next—becomes the relationship. The actual account holding your money? You won't know which bank owns it. More importantly, you won't care.

This Isn't a Prediction. It's Already Happening.

Don't believe me? Run this experiment.

Ask someone under 25 what bank they use. Actually ask them. You know what you'll hear half the time? "Chime." "Cash App." "Venmo."

They're naming the interface, not the institution. They're naming the app they interact with, not the FDIC-insured entity holding their deposits.

The brand relationship has already moved up the stack. The bank has already become the utility behind the utility. The shift isn't coming—it's here. Most financial institutions just haven't felt the full weight of it yet.

This generation doesn't have a relationship with their bank. They have a relationship with their app. The bank is just some name in small print at the bottom of the screen. Necessary? Sure. Important? Not really.

Then Add AI Agents to the Mix

Now let's accelerate this trend by adding the next layer: AI agents.

Your AI agent doesn't want to log into your bank's mobile app. It doesn't care about your bank's "award-winning user experience" or "innovative features." It definitely doesn't want to navigate whatever security theater your bank has erected.

Your agent cares about three things: API reliability, transaction costs, and speed.

That's it.

Your AI agent manages your subscriptions. It identifies the ones you're not using and cancels them. It pays your invoices at the optimal time to maximize float. It automatically allocates money to savings based on your spending patterns and upcoming obligations. It optimizes your credit utilization across multiple cards.

And it does all of this without you ever thinking about which bank account the money sits in.

The agent doesn't develop brand loyalty. It doesn't care about your bank's heritage or its friendly branch staff or its Super Bowl commercial. It optimizes for cost and reliability, full stop.

The Uncomfortable Question Every Financial Institution Must Answer

So here we are. At the inflection point. And every financial institution—every bank, every credit union, every fintech startup—needs to answer one question:

Are you building the interface layer that orchestrates the customer relationship? Or are you the plumbing underneath someone else's interface?

Let me be crystal clear about what this means.

One of these positions has pricing power. One of these positions owns the customer relationship. One of these positions captures margin and builds brand equity.

The other competes on basis points until margins compress to nothing.

The interface captures the customer. The interface has the relationship. The interface decides which plumbing to use—and the plumbing has to accept whatever price the interface is willing to pay.

The plumbing serves the interface. Period.

There's No Shame in Being Plumbing (But There's Less Profit)

Look, I'm not here to romanticize one business model over another. There's nothing inherently wrong with being infrastructure. The world needs reliable plumbing.

Visa and Mastercard have built fantastic businesses as infrastructure. AWS is plumbing for the internet, and it's doing just fine. Stripe is payment plumbing, and it's worth $50 billion.

But let's be honest about what the plumbing business model means: Lower margins. Less differentiation. Constant pressure on pricing. Competition based primarily on reliability and cost.

You can build a good business there. You just can't build the same business you've been running for the past fifty years.

If you're a regional bank with 150 branches and a checking account product that looks identical to everyone else's checking account product, you need to understand what happens when you become the invisible infrastructure layer.

You don't get to charge the fees you used to charge. You don't get the deposit float you used to enjoy. You don't get the customer relationship that used to drive cross-sell opportunities.

You get to compete with a hundred other banks on API uptime and transaction costs.

The Strategic Fork in the Road

Every financial institution is standing at a fork in the road right now, whether they realize it or not.

One path: Invest heavily in becoming the interface layer. Build the orchestration platform. Own the AI agent. Create the experience that customers interact with daily. This requires massive investment in technology, user experience, and platform thinking. It means competing with tech companies on their turf.

The other path: Embrace the infrastructure role. Become the most reliable, lowest-cost, most efficient plumbing possible. Strip out the expensive branches and the legacy technology. Build world-class APIs. Optimize for the needs of the interface layer, not the end customer.

Both can work. What won't work is pretending the choice doesn't exist.

What definitely won't work is trying to be both while lacking the investment dollars and technical talent to compete on either dimension.

Which One Are You Building?

This isn't a theoretical exercise. This is strategic planning for 2025 and beyond.

The executives who understand this dynamic will position their institutions for the next era of financial services. They'll make hard choices about where to invest and what to abandon.

The ones who don't will keep investing in mobile apps that customers barely tolerate, branches that fewer people visit, and "digital transformation" initiatives that amount to putting lipstick on legacy core systems.

So I'll ask again: Which one are you building?

The interface that captures customers? Or the plumbing that serves someone else's interface?

Your answer to that question will determine what your business looks like in five years.

Choose wisely.