Bank 4.0: Banking everywhere, never at a bank by Brett King

Part 01 Bank 2050
1 ➡ Getting Back to First Principles
2 ➡ The Regulator’s Dilemma

1

Getting Back to First Principles
Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.
—Mike Tyson
Banking isn’t rocket science, but as it turns out, rocket science is a great
analogy for the future state of banking. Putting men on the moon is, to date,
perhaps the greatest endeavour mankind has committed to. It inspired
generations and, until we successfully put boots on the surface of Mars, will
likely remain the single most significant technological and scientific
achievement of the last 100 years. Getting men to the moon required massive
expenditure, incredible advances in engineering, a fair bit of good old fashion
luck and the “right stuff”.
Before the US could get Neil Armstrong all the way up to the moon, they
needed the right stuff in a different area—in figuring out the science.
At the end of World War II there was a very serious plan that would set
the foundation for the entire Space Race and Cold War. It was the race for the
best German scientists, engineers and technicians of the disintegrating Nazi
regime. The predecessor to the CIA, the United States’ OSS (Office of
Strategic Services), were instrumental in bringing more than 1,500 German
scientists and engineers back to America at the conclusion of World War II.
The highly secretive operation responsible for this mass defection was
codenamed “Overcast” (later to be renamed Operation “Paperclip”). The
primary purpose of this operation was denying access to the best and brightest
Nazi scientists to both the Russians and the British, who were both allies of
the US at this time. “Paperclip” was based on a highly secretive document
known within OSS circles as “The Black List”, and there was one single
name that was right at the top of that list: Wernher von Braun.
In the final stages of World War II, von Braun could see that the Germans
were ultimately going to lose the war, and so in 1945 he assembled his key
staff and asked them the question: who should they surrender to? The
Russians, well known for their cruelty to German prisoners of war, were too
much of a risk—they could just as easily kill von Braun’s team as utilize
them. Safely surrendering to the US became the focus for von Braun’s own
covert planning in the closing days of World War II. The question he faced

Bank 4.0: Banking everywhere, never at a bank by Brett King