Traditional banks were built around control, caution, and slow-moving infrastructure. That model worked when banking changed over decades. It looks far less convincing now.
In this episode of Money Rewired by CoinsPaid Media, Murat Prokopov, Strategic Partnerships Executive at Coinspaid, speaks with Joe Wilson, Chief Evangelist and former COO of the European digital bank bunq. The conversation goes inside how a digital bank thinks about competition, why it treats regulation as part of the game rather than a blocker, and how it handles crypto and AI without turning either into a marketing stunt.
The full episode is available now on the CoinsPaid Media YouTube channel and popular podcast platforms:
Regulation Is Not the Excuse
A lot of fintechs blame Europe’s regulatory environment for moving too slowly. Wilson does not buy that argument. His view is simpler: if you are building in finance, regulation is the operating environment, not an obstacle you can complain your way around.
That mindset matters because it separates real operators from companies that only sound innovative.
bunq Does Not Treat Users Like Children
One of the more revealing parts of the conversation is bunq’s approach to crypto inside the app. Features like auto-roundups let users invest spare change into digital assets automatically. Wilson’s point is that banks should not assume customers need to be protected from every financial decision.
Instead of gatekeeping, bunq focuses on building products people actually want, while leaving the crypto infrastructure to a specialist partner like Kraken.
That approach says a lot about where neobanks have an edge over legacy institutions: they are willing to make finance feel usable instead of paternalistic.
AI Is Useful When It Disappears Into The Workflow
Wilson is equally blunt about artificial intelligence. In finance, AI has become one of those terms that gets used everywhere and means very little. His view is that the real value is not in shouting about AI, but in using it quietly to improve how a bank actually runs.
For bunq, that means operational efficiency, better systems, and less theatre.
What This Episode Is Really About
This episode is not just a comparison between neobanks and traditional banks. It is about a deeper divide: between institutions that still think innovation is a communications exercise and institutions that treat it as a product and infrastructure problem.
Wilson’s message is clear. The banks that will matter most are not the ones talking loudest about the future. They are the ones building around user behavior, regulation, crypto infrastructure, and practical AI use.
