From the romance of disruption to the discipline of infrastructure: the end of Fintech innocence.

I arrived in Miami earlier this year to speak at the 4th Annual Business of Blockchain & Tokenization Conference with a deliberately provocative message: fintech is not ending, but its first age may be. The title of my keynote was “Fintech is Dead! Long Live Fintech!” but the deeper argument was more precise. What is fading is not financial innovation itself. What is fading is the innocence that surrounded it — the belief that technology alone would make finance more open, more inclusive, and more fair.

That first age of fintech was driven by a powerful dream. It promised fewer intermediaries, lower friction, broader access, and better incentives through code. It told a generation of entrepreneurs, policymakers, and researchers that finance could be rebuilt around transparency, automation, and user empowerment. And that dream mattered. It captured real deficiencies in legacy financial systems and helped push serious innovation forward. But, as I argued in Miami, dreams do not bear weight forever. Eventually they meet institutions, markets, incentives, and human behaviour.

That is where the story changed.

One lesson is that tokenisation does not automatically improve behaviour. In some contexts, it can distort it. Our current work under review at a journal on blockchain-based gaming applications such as STEPN points to this clearly. Liquid token rewards can accelerate growth, but they can also make participation highly price-sensitive, crowding out intrinsic motivation and turning a product into something more fragile than it first appears. When users are watching token prices more closely than the underlying service, the product stops being a product in the ordinary sense. It starts to become a speculative mechanism.

A second lesson is that decentralisation does not make power disappear. It reorganises it. Research I discussed at the conference on incentivised blockchain-based social media platformsLink opens in a new window showed that bots are not simply background noise. They are incentive-responsive actors. They engage early, affect visibility, and shape how human users interpret quality and momentum. That means governance is never absent, even in systems that present themselves as decentralised. It re-enters through protocol rules, reward functions, infrastructure control, automated agents, and concentrated holdings. The real design question is not whether a system is decentralised in the abstract; it is how power actually operates once the system is live.

A third lesson is that access is not the same as inclusion. This is a point the fintech sector has not always confronted honestly enough. It is entirely possible to make a financial product easier to access while still leaving users exposed to confusion, predatory design, weak transparency, and inadequate consumer protection. Access without literacy and safety can turn quickly into exploitation. That is why the next phase of fintech has to be judged by more than efficiency. It must also be judged by whether it builds trust, improves financial understanding, and produces better outcomes for the people it claims to serve.

So what comes after this first age?

My view is that we are witnessing a shift from spectacle to supervision, from anti-institutional rhetoric to institutional absorption, and from the romance of disruption to the discipline of infrastructure. This is why stablecoins, tokenised deposits, CBDCs, and interoperability matter so much. Stablecoins proved that there is real demand for programmable money: fast, global, always-on movement of value. They solved a user problem before banks did. But the more durable story is now less about rebellion against institutions and more about how these capabilities are being folded into regulated, interoperable financial systems.

That is also why developments such as Swift’s move toward shared-ledger orchestration are so important. The future is unlikely to belong entirely to either “old finance” or “new finance.” It is more likely to be hybrid. The systems that endure will combine programmability with governance, speed with resilience, and innovation with trust. In other words, the future of fintech is becoming less ideological and more infrastructural.

For the Gillmore Centre, this is exactly where our mission sits. We were founded not to celebrate financial technology uncritically, and not to reject it reflexively, but to study it rigorously and shape it responsibly. The Centre’s work spans digital finance, blockchain, AI, financial literacy, public policy, and the wider societal implications of technological change. That means asking harder questions than the first wave of fintech often asked. Not only whether something can be built, but whether it should be built this way. Not only whether it scales, but whether it serves. Not only whether it is innovative, but whether it is durable, trustworthy, and fair.

Miami reinforced for me that we are now in a more serious era. The easy slogans are fading. The difficult design questions are arriving.

That is not bad news. It is a sign of maturity.

The end of fintech innocence is not the end of ambition. It is the beginning of responsibility. And at the Gillmore Centre, that is exactly where we believe the most important work now begins.

At the Gillmore Centre, these questions are now shaping our next phase of research. We are especially interested in how programmable finance can be designed to support genuine inclusion rather than merely expand access; how AI, tokenisation, and digital identity will reshape trust in financial markets; how regulators and institutions can govern hybrid financial infrastructures without stifling innovation; and how consumers, firms, and public bodies can develop the literacy and safeguards needed to use these technologies responsibly. These are not narrow technical questions. They are questions about market design, public trust, institutional accountability, and the future social purpose of finance.