Ex-Barclays chief says banking could face its own ‘Kodak moment’; urges banks to embrace fintech solutions

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Antony Jenkins, former chief executive officer of Barclays

“We’re really at the end of the beginning of what we see as a revolution driven by technology with financial services and fintech is really a too narrow categorization of what’s going on here,” Jenkins told CNBC at the Money 20/20 Europe fintech conference in Copenhagen on Monday. “As the technologies develop and season, they’re going to create a totally different way of doing banking and financial services.”

In 2015, the former Barclays boss warned that banks were approaching an “Uber moment” because of new financial technologies. He predicted that the financial services would see a decline in staff and branches “by as much as 50 percent over the next 10 years”. Today he warned of a similar threat.

“Now we will see the possibility – not necessarily the probability – of what we call a ‘Kodak moment’, where increasingly banks become irrelevant to their customers,” he said. “Banks can avoid that, but they have to act now, and what they really need to do is think about innovation, but also transformation, doing something radically different.”