Bank 5.0: The Rise of the Agentic Bank - Hardcover

King, Brett

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1394446489 ISBN 13: 9781394446483

Publisher: Wiley, 2026

Synopsis

BANKING EVERYWHERE, BEYOND HUMAN LIMITS

A new financial system is emerging―one where humans aren’t the primary customer.

AI agents will buy goods, manage portfolios, negotiate loans, and trade with each other at a speed and scale no human organization can match. By the 2030s, billions of agents will participate in the global economy, outnumbering humanity itself.

Those agents will need banks engineered for them. Not for us.

BANK 5.0 takes you inside the era of Agentic Banking: where programmable money moves autonomously, regulation becomes economic infrastructure, and financial institutions evolve into intelligent systems that never close.

Brett King―the #1 global bestselling author who forecasted the decline of the branch, the rise of mobile, and the emergence of embedded finance―now turns to the most profound rethink of banking since Cosimo de’ Medici.

The question is no longer whether banking will change. It’s whether any of today’s banks will make it to BANK 5.0 .

“Once more, Brett King predicts the future of banking and financial services: enabling the economies of fully autonomous societies in the age of agentic intelligence. More than insights, he has charted a roadmap to successfully navigate a transition that is already underway. Bank 5.0 lays out the urgent questions, strategic choices, and pitfalls every leader needs to act on today to remain relevant for tomorrow.”
Michael Miebach, CEO, Mastercard

“AI will be the most transformational technology for banking. While the smartphone democratized access, AI will democratize intelligence. The book offers an exciting vision of financial services that is simpler, more human, and more useful, where technology amplifies judgment, strengthens trust, and helps customers around the world achieve better outcomes.”
David Vélez, CEO and Founder, Nubank

About this title

About the Author

Brett King is the #1 ranked Fintech Influencer globally (FinTech Magazine), a top 7 globally ranked futurist (Global Gurus), a 9-time international bestselling author, award-winning speaker, and Fintech Hall of Famer who hosts two globally dominant podcasts (The Futurists / Breaking Banks) with over 20 million downloads. King was the founder of the world’s first mobile neobank, Moven (2010), and media companies Provoke Media and The Futurists Network. He is co-founder of LumaBrush AI, an advanced AI oral healthcare startup.
He advised the Obama administration on the future of banking; President Xi cited his book Augmented on smart cities and AI; and he currently advises the UAE Prime Minister’s Office, Mastercard’s EEMEA AI Center of Excellence and the UAE Central Bank. He sits on the board of directors of Barq, the fastest-growing neobank globally.
His book Augmented: Life in the Smart Lane was a top 10 nonfiction book in North America. Bank 4.0 was awarded Best Foreign Book for Russia for 2019. Branch Tomorrow was published in 2025 by Wiley and Marshall Cavendish. Bank 5.0 is his eighth book in the banking sphere.

From the Back Cover

BANKING EVERYWHERE, BEYOND HUMAN LIMITS

A new financial system is emerging―one where humans aren’t the primary customer.

AI agents will buy goods, manage portfolios, negotiate loans, and trade with each other at a speed and scale no human organization can match. By the 2030s, billions of agents will participate in the global economy, outnumbering humanity itself.

Those agents will need banks engineered for them. Not for us.

BANK 5.0 takes you inside the era of Agentic Banking: where programmable money moves autonomously, regulation becomes economic infrastructure, and financial institutions evolve into intelligent systems that never close.

Brett King―the #1 global bestselling author who forecasted the decline of the branch, the rise of mobile, and the emergence of embedded finance―now turns to the most profound rethink of banking since Cosimo de’ Medici.

The question is no longer whether banking will change. It’s whether any of today’s banks will make it to BANK 5.0 .

“Once more, Brett King predicts the future of banking and financial services: enabling the economies of fully autonomous societies in the age of agentic intelligence. More than insights, he has charted a roadmap to successfully navigate a transition that is already underway. Bank 5.0 lays out the urgent questions, strategic choices, and pitfalls every leader needs to act on today to remain relevant for tomorrow.”
Michael Miebach, CEO, Mastercard

“AI will be the most transformational technology for banking. While the smartphone democratized access, AI will democratize intelligence. The book offers an exciting vision of financial services that is simpler, more human, and more useful, where technology amplifies judgment, strengthens trust, and helps customers around the world achieve better outcomes.”
David Vélez, CEO and Founder, Nubank

From the Inside Flap

The speed of change is the disruptive force.

In less than a decade, AI has gone from autocomplete to autonomous. Emergent models write their own code, run their own experiments, and improve their future versions faster than any human research team can. Recursive self-improvement is no longer a theoretical possibility; it is a tightening deployment schedule. Agentic systems that were clunky demos 18 months ago now execute multi-step commercial workflows in the billions of dollars, negotiate on behalf of their humans, and transact at scale without a human in the loop.

Our financial system was not built for this. It was built for humans who need to sleep, for settlement windows and batch processing, for compliance checks that assume a legal person signed for everything. Every layer of our current system presumes a human counterparty. That assumption is about to break.

BANK 5.0 is the blueprint for what replaces it. Brett King maps the architecture of autonomous finance: machine-native identity and agent credentialing, programmable money and real-time settlement, embedded regulation that executes rather than reports, and risk models built for agents that never tire and never wait.

The agents are already here. The only question is which banks will remain when the dust settles.

Edition details

• Publisher: Wiley
• Publication date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1394446489
• ISBN 13: 9781394446483
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 496