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To mark becoming a fully-fledged bank in the UK, the mega-fintech Revolut launched a TV advertising campaign featuring Irish comedian Graham Norton on a brown horse. As Norton explains cheekily at the end: “It’s a metaphor.” The advert, which is a parody of some of the advertising tropes historically used by legacy banks, is a fun watch, posing a simple but in fact consequential question – one that possibly keeps bank executives awake at night today: What is a bank?

It’s a clever provocation. In a few seconds, the ambitious digital startup turned financial services powerhouse challenges decades of accumulated assumptions about balance sheets, operating structures, and the very definition of financial intermediation. But do these hold water in 2026?

What will the banking leaders look like in five years?

Banking models, after all, were built for a different time, one defined by relatively stable geopolitics and smooth cross-border trade, fairly predictable regulations, centralized banking infrastructure, and long technology cycles. For decades, scale, capital strength, and regulatory privilege formed durable competitive moats. Banks sat at the center of client liquidity, orchestrating payments, lending, and risk with little serious threat to their primacy.

Today, those foundations are being relentlessly pounded and squeezed by a set of existential and overlapping forces that are galloping mercilessly forward. Economic statecraft is bumping up against revenue streams; intelligent automation and agentic AI are reshaping workflows, organizational structures, and decision-making. Open banking, enabled by regulations like the Revised Payment Services Directive (PSD2) in the EU and similar elsewhere, disintermediates certain key functions that banks used to control end-to-end.

Once more, the customer is king and queen – and banks must rebuild for heightened customer-centricity, looking to the likes of Netflix, Uber, and Apple for inspiration – while at the same time strengthening resilience and compliance with more complex regulations.     

 I by IMD’s new report, The Future of Banking: The structural forces reshaping global banking – and the strategic decisions leaders cannot defer, identifies six structural shifts that will determine whether banks will be able to operate successfully over the coming decades or lose momentum and market share. The report examines these shifts through the perspectives of IMD professors, the real-world experience of bank leaders, and executives of breakthrough technology innovators, positioning as strategic partners to help banks build new competitive advantage.