For a long time we’ve treated “mobile innovation” as a design problem: Better screens, smoother journeys or a new round of navigation tweaks. But the more I look at where the industry is heading, the more it feels like we’re focusing on the wrong layer.
Mobile isn’t going to be shaped by the app itself but by the intelligence running underneath it.
That’s why the Revolut & NVIDIA backing is interesting to me. It suggests that forward-looking players aren’t just improving interfaces, they’re preparing for a world where decisions, context and prediction matter more than menus and layouts.
A shift from building features to building understanding
If this direction continues, competitive advantage will increasingly sit in a different place. Not in adding more options or polishing the UI, but in how well a service can:
- Interprete a customers situation
- Anticipate what they might need
- Reduce unnecessary decision making by adjusting journeys as things change
- Keep complexity hidden by solving issues before a customer even notices
This won’t be about designing another digital surface. It’s now about creating a layer that thinks.
A layer that turns a banking app from something people tap on… to something that quietly shapes the experience around them.
Why is the Revolut–NVIDIA link is worth paying attention to?
NVIDIA doesn’t normally show up in fintech cap tables for fun. Their presence usually signals an intention to back businesses that want to operate with a different level of computing horsepower.
So when a fast-moving fintech and an AI heavyweight connect, it suggests something broader is forming in the background:
a future where banking journeys are shaped equally, if not more by the intelligence interpreting what’s going on, not just by visual design.
Think of it as the shift from designing “flows” to designing understanding.
The shift is already happening but as with all great innovations, don’t expect an overnight revolution. See it as a signal that points to a direction where banking is heading:
- From being less dependent on screens to being more sensitive to context
- From being less about page layouts to being more about guiding decisions
- From bring less about interactions to being more about orchestration
In that world, the most valuable asset isn’t the app itself, it’s the intelligence layer that decides what the customer sees, when they see it and why.
What this could mean for the sector?
As this model , banks will be finding themselves not only competing with digital first fintechs, but with organisations powered by heavy-weight AI capabilities. And when that happens, the differentiators shift again to become the cognitive engine behind the experience.
Which means the question for the industry slowly changes from:
“How do we improve our app?”
to
“How do we build the intelligence that makes our app feel almost invisible?”
The future of mobile won’t be driven by what we design on the surface but by what’s interpreting everything underneath it.
So, if the industry really does move in this direction, the competitive edge won’t sit with the teams who redesign their app the most. It won’t sit in the latest UI trend either… It will sit with the organisations that build (or partner for) a strong intelligence layer.
In that world, the app becomes the surface. The intelligence becomes the value.
And the question for banks becomes less about how to rebuild the interface, and more about how to strengthen the embedded intelligence that shapes the experience.
Because that’s the part customers will actually feel, even if they never see it.
Stay Experiencing 