Even if the digitalisation of finance is irreversible, technologies are constantly evolving in as yet unknown directions – some are refined, others are discarded. Good arguments why digital innovations will triumph will remain theoretical as long as most people simply don’t use these innovations. For example, smartphones came onto the market back in the 1990s, but they were largely ignored back then.
So it’s sometimes the case that technical innovations are ahead of their time. We should judge technology not by its innovativeness, but by its probability to penetrate the market. There is another source of digital overconfidence that I would like to mention. This concerns the association of the digital era with entirely new and self-contained “laws".