Bridging the gap between big banks and challengers

American physicist and philosopher Thomas Kuhn came up with idea of a "paradigm shift" in the 1960s to describe a scientific revolution – a momentous discovery that fundamentally rewrites the laws of science, such as Galileo proving the Earth revolves around the Sun or Newton discovering gravity. It is not too much to say that finance is undergoing a paradigm shift today, driven by smartphones, financial technology startups, and trends such as blockchain and artificial intelligence. "Most of the change in the industry was quite incremental and what I regard as linear – the introduction of ATMs, the introduction of credit cards, those kinds of things," says Antony Jenkins, former chief executive of Barclays. "When you look at what's happening now with mobile banking, it's a true transformation. The power in people's pockets enables them to change things in really quite a radical way."