Safwan Zaheer has helped build digital banks, scale early stage companies to major exits, and pioneer AI decisioning systems that reshape lending. He has witnessed some of the biggest shifts in financial technology, yet nothing compares to the transformation unfolding now. “It took us 30 years to build internet commerce,” he says. “Three decades to earn trust, streamline payments, and build the digital rails that power a six trillion dollar economy. And now one breakthrough in AI threatens to rewrite the entire playbook in months, not years.”
For Safwan, a FinTech executive and AI strategist, the emergence of agentic AI is a foundational reset, one that changes where commerce begins, how decisions are made, and which companies survive the transition. AI is replacing search as the starting point of commerce, collapsing decades of digital behavior into a single intelligent interaction. Platforms that fail to integrate with these AI agents will vanish from the consideration set, while those that reinvent with intelligence will define the next era of finance.
The old digital journey started with search. A user typed a query, sifted through results, browsed options, then clicked. Today, AI agents collapse that funnel to a single moment. A user asks a question and the system combs through the entire internet in milliseconds. “AI has introduced a new front door,” Safwan says. “If your platform is not wired into the agent’s data pathways, you simply do not exist. We are now competing for inclusion in the AI’s next sentence.”
The Collapse of Moats
For years, companies poured money into brand equity, user experience, and loyalty mechanics, believing these were strategic differentiators. These protective advantages are rapidly losing value as AI agents become the primary interpreters of user intent. AI is stripping away traditional competitive moats like branding, UX, and loyalty because it evaluates products solely on outcomes and data quality.
“Your moats are not safe,” he explains. “AI does not care about your homepage design or the tone of your voice. It cares about outcomes, data quality, and relevance.” To stay relevant, companies must restructure their products to feed AI agents clean data, clear value, and seamless integration into the agent ecosystem.
In this new landscape, the agent becomes the decision maker. Platforms that once relied on marketing or visual design to win consideration now face a stripped down, outcome‑driven reality. This shift is forcing leaders across payments, lending, and investing to reconsider how their products are structured. The companies that thrive will be the ones that feed AI systems the cleanest data, deliver the clearest value, and integrate their capabilities into the agent ecosystem.
Reinventing Rather Than Optimizing
The threat is clear. But Safwan is more focused on the upside. To him, AI represents the most powerful catalyst for financial innovation since the advent of mobile banking. The organizations that treat AI as a reinvention tool, rather than one to improve efficiency, will define the next era of digital finance. His own experience leading a transformation at a private equity backed lender illustrates this dynamic. The business was grappling with slowing approvals and rising operational bottlenecks when Safwan and his team recognized that small, incremental fixes would never restore performance. “AI increased approvals by 15 points and originations by 25 percent,” he says. “But we did not approach this from an optimization angle. We approached it from a reinvention angle.”
Instead of tuning spreadsheets and adjusting credit policies, his team rebuilt the decisioning process from the ground up. The new engine replaced manual, inconsistent evaluation with intelligence that learned continuously, flagged risk patterns humans often missed, and removed bias baked into legacy scoring. Funding times fell sharply, operations costs dropped, and approval rates surged, proving how quickly reinvention can reshape an entire lending operation. This, Safwan believes, is the blueprint for the future. “The next generation of winners will be the teams bold enough to build intelligence into their code,” he says.
Competing for a Place in the Rewrite
What makes this moment so defining is its speed. Internet commerce evolved gradually across decades. AI driven commerce does not afford that luxury. Platforms that fail to integrate with agentic systems risk disappearing before they can react. “It took 30 years to build internet commerce, carefully and methodically,” Safwan says. “AI is rebuilding it in a fraction of that time.”
Still, he remains optimistic. He sees enormous potential for early movers who understand how AI reshapes discovery, selection, and relevance. He sees an opportunity to amplify human judgment rather than replace it. And he sees a new category emerging. “This is not the end of digital finance,” he says. “It is the beginning of intelligent finance. AI is rewriting the rules of digital finance. Lead the rewrite or be left out of the script entirely.”
Follow Safwan Zaheer on LinkedIn for more insights, or visit his website.
