Conference Agenda

Everyday Banking is a sub-sector of financial services that comprises institutions and processes enabling the servicing of current accounts and mobile wallets. Current accounts are the simplest financial products—abstracted as places where individuals and SMEs store their money in the most liquid form to receive, deposit, or withdraw funds and pay for regular expenses and bills.

Everyday banking is part of the finance sector, formally recognised as a critical national infrastructure of the UK. Despite its CNI status, finance remains largely a self-regulated sector, with little to no standardized resilience modelling for its industries. Recent regulation in the EU and the UK addressing the operational resilience of the financial institutions is prescriptive and at the same time narrow, avoiding a systemic view. This paper will not focus on the regulation in place but rather points towards a few mechanisms which change significantly for everyday banking industry operates.

I will discuss three types of unbundling: 1) the unbundling of banking, payments, and money 2) technology driven unbundling or modularisation and 3) spatial unbundling. These phenomena are by no means unique to the UK. They are all quite poorly understood especially in their concurrent effects in terms of industry resilience.

Most large economies especially in the Global North do not have yet an uncoupling of money, payments, and banking of the type of Alipay and WeChat in China or PIX in Brazil (Awrey, 2021). However, signs of uncoupling exist even in the UK, and the paper will highlight how these manifests in the UK. Technology-driven unbundling goes far beyond digital unbundling, much praised in fintech conferences as a phenomenon which allows new entrants to offer an increased, hyper-personalised choice of financial services coupled with a re-bundling of selected services on one’s phone. The technology driven unbundling refers to a restructuring and modularisation of the deeper layers of banking technology leading to new possible business models and legal structures for delivering financial services (Sonea, 2017).

Last but not least, spatial unbundling is new as a concept (Sonea, 2024) and it refer to a process of extreme spatial separation of basic banking services viewed from the point of the customer. In such a case, example a person who cannot do digital banking has to go to a post office mobile van on Tuesday to get their pension in cash, look for a bank mobile van if somehow they missed the post office van stopping for half an hour every other week in their area, drive or be driven for 40km to town to pay their credit card in a physical bank branch. This is not an exception or some rare occurrence but a phenomenon which I found in the UK through computational spatial analysis of access to banking triangulated with field observation. The UK the branch network shrinked in the past five years to an extreme; the typology of branches communicates little to the user about their real functionality. As such, this process forces an increased monetary, physical, and cognitive cost on the most vulnerable individuals in society. In contrast to digital unbundling, the spatial unbundling of the basic banking services is exactly the opposite - it is the removal of control and choice.

All types of unbundling are usually followed by re-bundling of components and services in new forms in terms of firms, business models, and ways of consuming the resulting services. It is not yet fully clear how the system reconfigures. Equally important, when CNIs operations are disrupted or compromised, they could have a significant impact on people and economy. With this in mind, the monitoring of unbundling and re-bundling of basic banking services is not a theoretical exercise but something that should be at the top of the regulators’ agenda. The paper will present a couple of unbundling scenarios which ask for a rethink of everyday banking infrastructure resilience modelling and monitoring.