Banks retain assets while platforms contest 40 percent of revenue
Technology-based banking models could contest roughly 40 percent of revenues within ten years while traditional banks retain about three-quarters of assets, according to scenarios in a Bank for International Settlements (BIS) working paper.
Balance sheets stay, margins migrate
Christian Schmieder, Renzo Corrias and Oliver Wünsch classify about 9,000 banks across more than 150 jurisdictions into six business models.
Their four ten-year scenarios put emerging models below 5 percent of assets under slow transformation, at 15–20 percent under technology acceleration, at 20–30 percent under platform expansion and around 3 percent under political uncertainty.
The trend baseline is about 3.5 percent.
Platforms capture payments, origination, advice and deposit interfaces while banks retain exposures and risk transformation.
Under platform expansion, net interest margins face illustrative compression of 20–40 basis points.
Digital withdrawals accelerate across incumbent and emerging models, shortening the interval between liquidity stress and capital impairment.
Judgement rather than prediction
The scenarios formalise expert judgement, not forecasts: driver intensities and sensitivities are not statistically estimated.
The projections exclude wider migration to non-bank finance and widespread central bank digital currency adoption.
Platform expansion also assumes no endogenous regulatory response, making its range an upper-bound illustration.
Across scenarios, the authors prioritise revised deposit-outflow assumptions, operational and third-party resilience, earnings-based solvency assessment and better data on emerging providers.
Asset dominance is no safeguard
Retaining assets does not protect banks' customer relationships or earnings.
The paper's strongest warning concerns faster funding stress and dependence on providers outside the balance sheet.
Its numerical shares remain conditional judgements, not measured probabilities.