Brett King is an Australian futurist, author, and co-founder and CEO of Moven, a New York-based mobile banking startup. He is regarded as an influencer in financial services globally, and his book Augmented was cited by China's President Xi Jinping as recommended reading on artificial intelligence. His book Bank 4.0 was awarded Top Book by a Foreign Author in Russia for the year 2019, as judged by an independent panel audited by PricewaterhouseCoopers.
Bank 2.0, mapped technological innovations being used by banks to better use things like social media, mobile devices, and business intelligence—while pointing out that the world's banks were adapting at a relatively slow pace as compared to the evolution of the technologies involved. Information Age wrote of the work that, "King's overall argument is that the credit crunch and ensuing recession have intensified the need for innovation in the financial services sector."
Branch Today, Gone Tomorrow, discusses further about how banks are not innovating fast enough to stay relevant against their competitors. One of the key arguments King uses, is that disruptive technologies change consumer behavior, which can lead consumers to leave their traditional institutions.
BANK 3.0. Why Banking Is No Longer Somewhere You Go But Something You Do King has said that the difference between this work and Bank 2.0 was that the former work was an awareness raising effort, and in Bank 3.0, King provides solutions to everyday banking problems—partially inspired by his app Moven. He also provides questions for banks to answer in terms of how they can regain their competitive edge.
Breaking Banks: The Innovators, Rogues, and Strategists Rebooting Banking?, named for his radio show, has the central premise that the banking system is broken, and that banking innovators are fixing the system rather than breaking it down themselves. Jane Haskin of Banking Exchange wrote that "every banker should read this book" and that "After I read one of Brett King's books, I am always uneasy because it makes me realize how fast banking is changing."
Augmented: Life In The Smart Lane Following on from the Industrial or Machine Age, the Space Age and the Digital Age, the Augmented Age will be based on four key disruptive themes - Artificial Intelligence, Experience Design, Smart Infrastructure, and HealthTech. The book describes how society will be impacted by technologies that will change the world more in the next 20 years than it has in the last 250 years. Augmented topped the Top 10 non-fiction bestsellers in North America. In 2018 it was noted that Chinese PresidentXi Jinping had Augmented on his bookshelf.
Bank 4.0: Banking Everywhere, Never at a Bank was the top-selling Amazon banking book for 2019, and awarded Top Foreign Language Book. It tackles the topic of whether banks have a future at all in the emerging, technology embedded world of the 21st century.
Other work
In addition to writing for the BBC, King guest blogged for Huffington Post. He has also appeared as an industry commentator on cable and network news, and hosts a radio show " Breaking Banks" on VoiceAmerica, with about nine million monthly listeners and with WVNJ 1160 in New York. He has also partnered with FinExtra to produce on-air interviews with women leaders in the financial tech sector. He spoke as part of Asian Institute of Finance's Distinguished Speaker Series in 2017 entitled "Bank 4.0: Banking everywhere, but not at a bank" in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. He also spoke at the St Petersburg International Economic Forum on the subject of the future of banking, blockchain and cybersecurity.
Moven
In 2011, King co-founded Moven app that provides real-time updates for debit card purchases. The company raused raised an initial $2.4m of seed money in 2012 and released the Beta version February 2013. The app was named "Best in Show" at Finovate 2013 in London and raised a Series A investment round of $8m for product development and international expansion in July 2014. The company is headquartered in New York City and has partnered with banks including TD Bank in its app's operation. In 2012 King was named "Bank Technology News Innovator of the Year" by the trade newspaperAmerican Banker.
