Foreign exchange has traditionally been built around national currencies, each tied to a country or region. Pounds, dollars, euros and yen are issued within national or regional systems, and moving value across those systems creates the need for FX.

Brett King thinks that assumption is starting to weaken.

“The way we think about currency today as geographically bound is not really efficient in the future system, because you need broad, widespread acceptance. And that requires you to be cross-border,” the futurist and bestselling author told FX World in an interview ahead of his keynote at the FX.World conference, taking place this November at Fiera Roma in Rome.

For King, that shift goes beyond currency. In an increasingly connected world, he argues that identity and financial services will also become less dependent on where someone is physically based.

“I don’t think geographically bound identity makes much sense in the future,” he said. “We’re going to need portable digital identities that work across different geographies.”

A parallel FX market is already forming

Stablecoins offer an early example of the kind of cross-border digital money King is describing.

A March 2026 paper by researchers at the Bank for International Settlements and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) found that more than 70% of conversions into dollar-backed stablecoins came from currencies other than the US dollar.

Stablecoins such as USDT and USDC are designed to track the value of the US dollar, but can be accessed through exchanges and digital wallets in many countries. This allows users to gain exposure to the dollar without necessarily holding dollars in a US bank account.

For someone exchanging their local currency for one of these tokens, the transaction effectively amounts to buying dollar exposure through a digital market rather than through the traditional FX market.

The researchers describe this emerging market as a “parallel, crypto-based FX ecosystem”.

In Nigeria, for instance, dollar-linked stablecoins are being used for remittances and payments to overseas suppliers, as well as a hedge against falls in the value of the naira, the local currency. According to the IMF, the country received about $59bn in total crypto-asset inflows between July 2023 and June 2024 and has accounted for roughly 60% of stablecoin inflows into sub-Saharan Africa since 2019.

King expects digital money to take a much larger share of the global economy over the coming decades. “If you look at, say, the 2050 timescale, by that stage probably half of the world’s economy will run on digital money versus fiat currency,” King predicted.

Automation beyond borders

If digital currencies are already making it easier to move value across borders, King believes automation could push that shift much further.

As AI agents begin to carry out more transactions on behalf of people and businesses, he argues that financial systems will need forms of money that can be programmed to operate within those cross-border digital systems.

“If you’re using these highly autonomous systems, you’re going to need more smart money,” he said. “You’re going to need more programmable money. You’re going to need more digital currency acceptance to be able to do this safely and to reduce risk.”

For King, that could eventually change not only how money moves, but how markets themselves operate. He foresees a world in which AI could optimise currencies and develop new ways of exchanging value.

“That could result in autonomous marketplaces and autonomous currencies that we can’t even imagine today,” he said.

The rise of the agentic bank

King sees the same forces reshaping currencies as part of a broader overhaul of banking and financial services.

His forthcoming book, Bank 5.0, is built around what he calls “the rise of the agentic bank”, a financial system designed for a world in which AI agents can make decisions and carry out transactions on behalf of their users.

That idea will also be at the centre of King’s keynote, BANK 5.0: The Rise of Autonomous Banking in a Smart World, taking place at Fiera Roma on the Global Finance Stage this November.

The session will explore a financial system in which humans are no longer necessarily the primary customer. King expects AI agents to buy goods, manage portfolios, negotiate loans and trade with one another at a speed and scale human organisations cannot match. By the 2030s, he argues, billions of these agents could be participating in the global economy, creating demand for banks and financial infrastructure engineered for machines as well as people.

“In the future, you just tell your agent what you need done and your agent will execute that on your behalf,” King explained. “Would you even interact with the bank, or would your agent do all of that?”

King argues that the financial system itself will have to adapt.

“The existing banking system is not built for machines,” he said. “We really need to create a layer of banking and financial services built specifically for artificial intelligence and agentic AI.”

Technology

Beyond geographical money: Brett King on the future of FX