In this episode of the Connector Podcast, host Koen Vanderhoydonk interviews Emmanuel Daniel, founder of TAB International (formerly The Asian Banker) and author of The Great Transition: The Personalization of Finance Is Here. Daniel introduces himself and his global work covering financial‑services innovation. He then explains his “AI as a mystic force” metaphor, linking the Year of the Snake mythologies—where snakes symbolize humanity’s quest for immortality—to contemporary AI, warning that unchecked AI could become a monster or a god‑like power. The conversation shifts to practical implications for banks: hyper‑personalization, AI‑driven disintermediation, and the need to rethink intermediation and back‑office operations. Daniel contrasts two dominant governance models—principles‑based (European/British) versus rules‑based (American/Chinese)—and discusses how each shapes AI ethics, bias mitigation, and regulatory responses worldwide. He argues that the most pressing challenge for banks is adapting to AI strategically, as it reshapes core business models and operational efficiency. The episode concludes with contact information for Daniel’s blog.
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Welcome to the Connector Podcast, an ongoing conversation connecting fintechs, banks, and regulators worldwide. Join CEO and founder Koen Vanderhoydonk as you learn more about the latest available trends and solutions in the markets.
Welcome to another Connector Podcast, and today I've got with me Emmanuel Daniel, a very, very special guest, normally from Singapore, but today in Shanghai. Can you introduce yourself? Welcome to the podcast.
Hey, Koen, very happy to be on your podcast. I'm Emmanuel Daniel. I'm the founder of The Asian Banker, which today has become called TAB International, because we're not just in Asia, we are in the Middle East, we are in Africa. And The Asian Banker and today TAP Global is very much a platform for the financial services industry to think about the future of the industry. I'm also the author of a great book on the future of finance called The Great Transition: The Personalization of Finance Is Here. And that's because I'm tracking a lot of the evolution of financial services to a high degree of personalization of the end user, which means that the institutions serving them, you know, have to morph and understand how to be relevant to customers in an age with technology that disintermediates them. Yeah. And then I travel all around the world. You know, I've been to 141 countries working towards the 196th. But as I do that, I go out looking for innovations and transformations that I can cover both in my writing and in podcasts like this.
Oh, brilliant. And what really caught my eye, and maybe it's exactly the reason why you're in China today, in one of your keynotes, you mentioned AI and immortality in the Year of the Snake. And you talked about—
Oh, it is the Year of the Snake.
It's the Year of the Snake. So you talked about AI as a mystic force. Can you enlighten us a little bit more what What did you mean by mystic force?
It's so interesting, Koen, that you should pick up on that one. Of all the speeches that I've given, I enjoy the ones that I explore society, civilizations, and cultures around the world. And in that particular speech, what I was doing was, it was the beginning of the Year of the Snake. In that speech, so you know, and so I used the occasion. And because we I come from Asia, which is from Japan to Australia, many of the Chinese-related cultures—Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Vietnamese—this is the year of the snake for them. So so then I what I did was I researched into snake mythologies, and then I found to my you know to my to my great interest that whether it was. You know, the original snake mythology started with the Egyptians, uh, and also the Sumerians, um, uh, the, the, the, the, the story of, um, uh, Gilgamesh, uh, and, uh, and the, the common theme, uh, uh, throughout human civilization on snakes, uh, is how, uh, humanity aspired for immortality and power.
Mm-hmm.
but were cursed to exchange immortality with renewal. And in all of these cultures, they use the excuse of the snake having to shed its skin to continue growing and living as a euphemism for humanity being denied the potential of being immortal. with the ability to renew themselves. And the relevance to what we're going through today, and the fact that, you know, my audience at that point in time were many different industries, people considering the impact of AI in, you know, society as a whole. And today we do worry that, you know, we may have created a monster that's going to be larger than us. It's going to render us ineffective. You know, it's going to— it's going to be a monster that we can't control. And AI, you know, has the potential of turning us into gods, you know, which is what humanity has aspired For many, many years. From the very beginning, you know, of civilization. And what the mythologies teach us is that we've been denied this immortality. The story of Adam and Eve, you know, if you eat of the fruit, the tree of the fruit of knowledge, you know, you will become like God. That's actually the phrase in in the Book of Genesis. And when the gods themselves cursed humanity, they relate us down to the ability to renew ourselves and through that become like gods, but deny us the opportunity or the ability to reach immortality. And so the corollary that I was that I was building in that speech was that, that, you know, we have certain limitations built into human humanity, you know, whether it's in our society or the nature of human beings, that as we aspire to the power of knowledge that is now possible in AI, there will be a few triggers that will keep us from achieving what we like most, which is to become supreme beings ourselves. And we need to look out for these triggers that will limit us. One of the triggers is, of course, that we all die. We live in physical bodies that will eventually lose itself and we die. And the other is that when we are imbued with so much power, we have an ability to self-destruct. We have an ability to destroy ourselves, things like that. Now, why are all these important? I think that what all of human society is working on right now is how do we limit the power that has been unleashed through AI and how do we target it? How do we control it? How do we control each other? And these are the themes that are being built. You know, new regulations are being put in place, you know, in different markets, regulations around the basic data that makes up AI, you know, and, and, and then the governance regulation on, you know, what we should limit ourselves from doing or, you know, to give ourselves scope and stuff like that. So a lot of work is taking place on all of these fronts so that AI will become a servant of humanity. It will not take a life of its own and become a demon that can destroy us. And when you look at it that way, then you begin to be able to understand what the governance structure should contain. And what should we aspire to in order that we don't self-destruct in that way? So what I was doing there was I was taking mythologies on the most powerful aspiration of mankind, of humanity in all cultures, which is immortality, and applying it to technology and what it's doing to us today.
No, that's very interesting. The other day I was listening to somebody, and it was a discussion about what is consciousness. And the guy was a professor, made a very interesting analogy. He said, if you could replace one synapse in your brains, and that would be an AI, would you then consider yourself to be conscious? And the answer was yes, because it's one out of a million. But what if that one out of a million becomes 50%? Are you still conscious? And what if that 50% is 100%? So it was a very interesting discussion about AI and where the responsibility lies, actually. But considering that you are so much in contact with banks and you talked about hyper-personalization before, I think it's a very valid point to bring hyper-personalization in relationship with fairness, bias mitigation. and compliance. So what would be tips for you to give to a bank to deal with this?
I think everything boils down to governance structures in institutions. And it's interesting that when I travel to different countries, I'm actually encountering different understanding of governance. If you take, for example, the big divide in governance between European-style governance or British-style governance with American-style governance. The British-style governance tends to focus around, you know, it's called a principle-based approach to governance. In other words, you come up with a small set of key rules, and then all the regulation around it is kept open-ended in order to be able to make decisions based on on principles, uh, whereas, uh, the American, um, approach to governance, uh, is to throw the law book at, uh, you know, at, at, at, at the protagonist. So the Americans are what we call rules-based, uh, governance, uh, and that, that is at a global level. Those are the 2 forms, the principal forms of governance, which is principles-based and, and, and, uh, and, uh, rules-based. The Americans have sub- rules for just about every imaginable, you know, action, activity, and so on. They don't leave it to the imagination in that sense. But even then, that's exactly the approach that ends up making lawyers very important to come out with, you know, with activities and structures which gets around the rules. And on the principles front, you're actually dependent on a legal structure that respects those principles. And then when they look at every case, every infraction on the principles, they go back to the principles to feed on it. So, you know, the English legal system, for example, which is based on case law, it studies every activity, and brings it back to the core principles. And in that same way, every different country has a different approach. Like in China, for example, it's supposed to be rules-based. The rules do exist, but the whole legal structure and the corporate structure in China has been, at least since after the Cultural Revolution, on the basis of if it ain't broken, you know, don't fix it. Let it go on, you know, for whatever time that it can still go on. So in that sense, I think that, you know, right now there's a lot of discussions around the world on ethics and so on. You know, not just AI. Before AI, were algorithms, right? And we've seen that in the platform economy where algorithms can influence entire societies to think in a certain way just by working on your bias and reinforcing your bias. And in AI, that becomes even more caustic. So these are the social structures with which we are trying to figure out a way that works. And it's still open season. There are no answers just now. And the answers will come when we are dealing with incredible breakthroughs in technology. So like you mentioned, if—
Mm-hmm.
Technology becomes science, or technology becomes self-aware, then what are we imbuing it with and how should we react?
Emmanuel, we're almost at the end of this podcast. Time flies when you're having fun, right? So I'm really enjoying your insights. So I thought I'd bring you a challenge. And the challenge is, if you look at banks, I'm going to give you 3 challenges and you let us know which one you think is the most prominent one and why. So the first one is adapting to AI on a strategic level, resisting disruption, or the third one, cultivating the cultural mindset of innovation. Which one would you pick?
Can you repeat that again?
Of course. Adapting to AI, resisting disruption, and working on culture mindset.
Oh, I see where you're going with this. I would say adapting to AI. Yeah.
And why?
I think that leaves it open-ended. And the other 2 options that you gave me, actually, you still need to deal with it when you deal with AI. You know, AI is transforming financial services at its core. And what is financial services at its core? Financial services at its core is about financial institutions being intermediaries. And because of AI, agentic AI, for example, the fact that the end user can build his own interfaces, it disintermediates the institution today more than anything else that has been possible in the past. So financial institutions have to scramble to, you know, to restate the intermediation business, restate why they are important in a transaction between 2 parties, whoever they are. And so, and then on top of that, AI also, you know, challenges the back office of financial institutions, you know, the middle office, the back office, the front office. And the technologies required to run them have been simplified dramatically. You know, and it's no longer even a, you know, a strategic advantage for financial institutions to have a better technology than the next guy. You know, with the simplest of technologies, you can still be relevant. So this intermediation and the operational backend of a financial institution Those are practical areas that you can think about and understand how the transformation is evolving. The other 2, the way I think, they get sorted out anyway as you deal with them.
I wanted to be a bit provocative, obviously. But thank you so much, Emmanuel, for your insights. If people want to talk to you and get in contact with you, who should contact you and how can they get to you?
Well, anybody can because I'm much more broader than just financial services now. And the best way is to go look up my blog page, which is my name, Emmanuel Daniel in one word with the 2 Ms there. So it's emmanueldaniel.com.
Great. Well, again, thank you for having you. Thank you also for the audience to stay tuned and please stay tuned for more news out of the financial industry. Thank you so much.
Thanks, Koen.
Thanks for listening to another episode of The Connector Podcast. To connect and keep up to date with all the latest, head over to www.jointheconnector.com or hit subscribe via your podcast streaming platform.
