The Question Every Board Is Asking
“How durable are our earnings if the world changes faster than our strategy?”
You can manage what you can measure. But the forces reshaping banking – AI, climate transition, embedded finance, regulatory shifts, geopolitical fragmentation – don’t show up in your quarterly dashboards until it’s too late to reposition.
Forecasting tells you how your bank performs in the world you already understand.
Foresight tells you how the world itself may change – and what that means for your strategy, capital, and competitiveness.
For banking leaders today, foresight isn’t an innovation tool. It’s a strategic control system for the entire enterprise.
What Foresight Actually Does for CEOs
Foresight isn’t about predicting the future. It’s about seeing multiple plausible futures clearly enough to make decisions now that remain sound across all of them.
Here’s what that looks like in practice:
1. It Protects Earnings Durability
The Problem: Your NIM, fee income, and credit quality are increasingly shaped by external forces you don’t control. Interest rate cycles you understand. But what if instant payments structurally compress net interest income? What if Big Tech wallets fragment your deposit base? What if climate transition risk reprices your loan book?
What Foresight Does: In 2019, a $40B European retail bank was planning a €180M neobank acquisition to defend digital market share. We built scenarios showing how embedded finance and platform banking could make both their legacy model and the acquisition target obsolete within five years.
They didn’t acquire. Instead, they restructured around open banking APIs and partnership infrastructure.
When COVID accelerated digital adoption in 2020, they had strategic optionality their peers didn’t. While competitors scrambled to salvage expensive neobank acquisitions, they scaled partnerships at a fraction of the capital cost.
Decision made in 2019. Advantage realized in 2020-2022.
Foresight let them see that earnings durability didn’t come from owning the digital channel—it came from owning the customer relationship regardless of channel.
2. It Sharpens Capital Allocation
The Problem: Your ICAAP, ILAAP, and stress tests typically model a narrow range of scenarios. But the biggest capital shocks come from futures you haven’t modeled: new regulatory regimes, sovereign fragmentation, sudden collateral repricing, cyber events, macro transitions that invalidate risk weights.
What Foresight Does: A Southeast Asian central bank engaged us in 2017 to map digital currency implications for monetary policy. Over three years, we helped them scenario-plan how stablecoins, CBDCs, and decentralized finance would interact with monetary transmission and banking system liquidity.
By 2020, when pandemic fiscal response accelerated digital payment adoption, they had capital and regulatory frameworks already in place. Other regional central banks were still debating whether to study the issue.
Their board didn’t react to disruption. They governed ahead of it.
Foresight expanded their view of capital risk beyond Basel scenarios – into structural shifts that would reshape the entire financial system.
3. It Reveals Which Investments Pay Off – And Which Don’t
The Problem: You’re investing heavily in AI, cloud, automation, digital infrastructure. But the payback period depends entirely on how the operating environment evolves. In which futures does AI reduce OPEX by 25%? In which futures does regulation slow the benefit? How do you sequence technology investment when you don’t know which future you’re building for?
What Foresight Does: In 2021, a $120B North American regional bank faced a choice: invest $60M in AI-powered credit underwriting or expand their existing analytics team and refine traditional models.
We built four scenarios around regulatory treatment of AI in lending, competitive adoption curves, and customer acceptance of algorithmic decisions.
In three of four scenarios, the AI investment delivered ROI within 36 months. In one scenario – where explainability requirements became onerous – the traditional path outperformed.
But here’s what mattered: the scenarios revealed that waiting was the worst option in all four futures. Competitive pressure and margin compression made standing still untenable.
They moved forward with AI investment, but built in regulatory flexibility from day one. Two years later, when the CFPB proposed new model governance rules, they were already compliant. Competitors are still retrofitting.
Foresight didn’t predict the regulation. It prepared them for multiple regulatory futures, including that one.
4. It Identifies Where Growth Actually Lives
The Problem: Organic growth is tightening. The next decade’s profit pools won’t mirror today’s. Where do you place your bets? Embedded finance? SME platform banking? Green transition finance? AI-enabled lending? Digital identity services? Tokenized assets?
Without foresight, growth becomes a gamble. With it, growth becomes a portfolio of strategic options aligned to multiple possible futures.
What Foresight Does: A Middle Eastern central bank engaged us in 2018 to map fintech and digital currency implications for their banking sector. We built scenarios around digital payment adoption, cross-border settlement, and regulatory sandbox evolution.
The scenarios revealed that banks waiting for “regulatory clarity” would miss the positioning window. The central bank used our work to design their regulatory sandbox before most regional competitors had frameworks.
By 2020, they became the regional leader in digital finance supervision—not by moving faster, but by positioning earlier.
The banks in that jurisdiction didn’t compete for yesterday’s profit pools. They shaped tomorrow’s.
5. It Answers the Existential Question: Will We Still Be Relevant?
The Problem: Many CEOs won’t say it publicly, but the existential risk is clear: What if the bank loses the customer relationship?
Platforms, telcos, fintechs, embedded finance providers—all are competing for the primary relationship you’ve assumed was structural, not strategic.
What Foresight Does: In 2022, a European banking association asked us to map scenarios for the future of banking in a platform economy. The question wasn’t “Will platforms disrupt banks?” but “In which futures do banks remain primary, and in which futures do they become infrastructure?”
We built four scenarios across two axes: regulatory stance (protective vs. open) and customer preference (relationship vs. transactional).
The findings were stark: In two of four futures, banks retained primacy. In the other two, they became utility providers with compressed margins and commoditized services.
But here’s what changed strategy: the scenarios revealed that the path to remaining primary wasn’t about defending the old model. It was about owning trust in a world where trust is the scarcest asset.
Banks that invested in privacy, security, financial health tools, and transparent AI could remain primary even in open platform environments. Banks that competed only on price and convenience would be disintermediated.
Three member banks used these scenarios to reshape their digital strategies around trust infrastructure, not transaction volume.
This is what foresight does: it doesn’t tell you what will happen. It shows you which strategic bets keep you relevant across multiple futures—and which don’t.
The Difference Foresight Makes
Without foresight, you manage the bank for the future you assume will arrive.
With foresight, you build a bank that wins in multiple futures – including the ones you didn’t expect.
The institutions that lead the next decade won’t be the ones with the best transformation programs. They’ll be the ones whose leadership saw structural change early and acted before the board had to explain it to shareholders.
What Happens Next
If you’re facing strategic decisions where the future matters more than the forecast, we should talk.
Not about foresight as a concept. About your specific challenges: earnings durability, capital allocation, technology investment, growth positioning, franchise relevance.
We’ve spent 13 years helping banking leaders see farther and decide better. Here’s how we can help you:
- The Executive Reframe – A 2-3 day foresight intervention for the CEO and ExCo to quantify how tomorrow’s forces translate into today’s KPIs.
- The Board Foresight Mandate – A strategic foresight engagement for boards to strengthen oversight, link foresight to risk and value creation, and embed future-readiness into governance.
- The Foresight Engine – For embedding anticipatory capability into your organization. Build foresight into the bank’s DNA and architecture – not as a project, but as a system.
Or start with a conversation about what your board is actually concerned about.
How We Map the Future of Banking
Our structured foresight system translates weak signals, market shifts, and systemic risks into clear strategic implications for banks.
How We Deliver Foresight
We combine disciplined foresight, banking expertise, and governance clarity to map futures that matter. We turn signals into strategy, translate futures into financial impact.
Explore Our Past Work
A look at how we have helped banks navigate uncertainty, strengthen governance, and make sharper strategic decisions.
Bancly. Strategic foresight for banking leadership.
