Twenty Years in UK Financial Services: What's Changed, and What Comes Next

Twenty years ago, I started my career at AXA. The industry I walked into and the one I work in today are almost unrecognisable. Two decades is long enough to see genuine structural change — not just new logos and rebrands, but a fundamental shift in how the industry thinks about the people it serves.

Here's what I've watched happen, and where I think we're headed.

From paper to platforms

When I started, financial services ran on paper and patience. Documents were posted. Claims took weeks. If you had a question, you called during office hours and waited on hold.

That world is gone. Customers now quote, claim, service and renew from an app at eleven o'clock at night, and they expect it to take minutes. Convenience stopped being a differentiator and became the price of entry. The organisations that thrived were the ones that stopped asking customers to work around their processes and started building processes around customers' lives.

From product-led to customer-led

For much of my early career, the industry designed products and then found people to sell them to. The centre of gravity has shifted decisively toward the customer.

Consumer Duty crystallised something that good practitioners already believed: fair outcomes are not a compliance footnote, they are the job. "Is this fair? Does the customer actually understand what they're buying? Are they getting value?" These are now board-level questions, embedded in how firms design, price and communicate. That change in posture — from selling to serving — is the one I'm most glad to have witnessed.

From gut feel to data

Underwriting, pricing, fraud detection and servicing have all been rebuilt around data and, increasingly, machine learning. Decisions that once relied on experience and instinct are now informed by models that see patterns no individual could.

This has made the industry faster, sharper and often fairer. But it has also changed the central question. For years we asked can we? Increasingly, the harder and more important question is should we? — and can we explain, transparently, why a model reached the decision it did. That tension will define the next decade.

What comes next

The obvious headline is agentic AI: systems that don't just answer a customer's question but act on their behalf — comparing, arranging, resolving. The technology is arriving quickly. The genuine challenge isn't capability. It's trust, explainability, and getting the human-in-the-loop balance right inside a heavily regulated industry.

And this is where I keep returning to a line most of us first heard in a comic book. With great power comes great responsibility. We now hold genuinely powerful tools — models that can price risk, detect fraud and personalise service at a scale that would have seemed impossible when I started at AXA. The firms that win the next twenty years won't be the ones that deploy those tools fastest. They'll be the ones that wield them responsibly: fair outcomes, honest data, and customers who are protected rather than exploited.

That's the future I want to help build.

What shifts have defined your years in the industry? I'd love to hear what you've seen.