Найджел Моррис из QED Investors: почему ИИ меняет финансы сильнее всех прошлых волн

Nigel Morris, co-founder of Capital One and managing partner of venture fund QED Investors, wrote in a guest column for Crunchbase News that artificial intelligence will rewrite the entire global value chain in finance — and this wave looks nothing like any technological wave he has seen in 40 years in the industry.

Why this wave is different

According to Morris, AI differs from past waves through two effects. The first — the marginal operating cost of serving a customer falls to nearly zero: routine operations, support, and underwriting are taken over by models rather than staff. The second — hyper-personalized products emerge that were previously impossible to assemble by hand for each customer.

Morris knows the industry from the inside: he co-founded Capital One — a bank that in the 1990s built its business on analyzing borrower data. He is now applying that same data thesis to AI, but with far more radical consequences for cost structure.

What banks need to do

Banks and fintechs win only in one scenario — if they are willing to cannibalize their own profitable business and rebuild operations around AI, Morris argues. The problem is that incumbents make money on the very processes that the technology makes nearly free: fees, manual underwriting, branches, call centers.

Morris warns that half-hearted adoption will not work. Bolting a chatbot onto old infrastructure is not the same as rebuilding the value chain. Anyone afraid to collapse their own margin risks losing the market to competitors who do it first.

"This time it's different" — that's how

Nigel Morris, co-founder of QED Investors, frames the central thesis of his column for Crunchbase News.

Who is at risk

At risk, by Morris's logic, are large incumbent banks with legacy infrastructure and high operating costs. Their advantage — scale and licenses — turns into a drag once the marginal cost of serving a customer among more agile players approaches zero.

QED Investors, co-founded by Morris, is one of the largest specialized fintech funds in the world, having invested in dozens of payments, lending, and neobank startups. His bet is transparent: new players built around AI from the start will end up in a winning position against those who will have to break themselves apart.

What this means

Morris's forecast is a bet that in finance, the winner is not the one with the most assets, but the one first willing to devalue their own business model in pursuit of zero costs and personalization. For banks, it's a choice between a painful restructuring now or losing the market later.