What I Discovered Inside the Bank Plumbing World Will Change How You Think About Money Forever

For years, I figured DBS, OCBC, and UOB were like the clockwork of Singapore’s financial scene—steady, predictable, unlikely to shift gears anytime soon. They sit quietly taking deposits, then lending that money out, pocketing the difference. Sounds simple? Sure. Almost boring, even. This perception is so ingrained that many of us just shrug and assume these banks are the unshakable bedrock of our economy. If trouble brewed, well, we’re comforted knowing the government would swoop in to save the day, right? But here’s a kicker: while government safety nets shield the system, they don’t safeguard your share prices from the inevitable ebbs and flows of this cyclical business.

Yet, what’s caught my attention—and frankly got me a little excited—is the under-the-radar revolution brewing beneath the surface. Blockchain, decentralized finance (DeFi), and the rise of AI agents have been buzzing headlines for years, mostly focusing on crypto hype. But the quieter, more profound transformation lies in how these tech shifts could reshape traditional banking and finance in ways most people never imagine. I’m not here to predict the future; I’m inviting you to unpack this journey with me. After all, around a quarter of my portfolio is enmeshed in financials, so understanding these changes isn’t just intellectual curiosity—it’s personal.

So, what if the banks you’ve leaned on for decades suddenly had to rethink their moat, where “lazy money” isn’t so lazy anymore? What if the friction that kept your deposits put now melts away, and your money becomes the financial equivalent of a restless wanderer? It’s time we dive deeper into the mechanics—how banks really make money, what the emerging ‘rails’ look like, and what that means for all of us with skin in the game. Ready for a wild ride through the quiet but seismic shifts in finance? Let’s get into it! LEARN MORE

For a long time, I thought of DBS, OCBC and UOB as businesses that just don’t change much. They take in your deposits, lend the money out, and earn the difference. They have done this for decades, and they will probably keep doing it for decades more.

A lot of Singaporeans think this way too. The local banks feel like the last thing that would ever fail. And if something did go wrong, the government would step in.

I agree that the government is unlikely to let our major banks fail. But that protects the banking system, not the price you paid for the shares. Banking is still a cyclical business. If you buy at the wrong time, you may have to sit through years of falling prices and dividend cuts. That is normal for banks.

What got me thinking more deeply is everything that has happened over the past six years: blockchain, decentralized finance (DeFi), and now AI agents. Most of the noise has been about crypto prices.

This post is about something quieter: how these developments could change traditional banking and finance in ways that might surprise a lot of people.

I’m not writing this as a prediction. Roughly 20 to 25% of my portfolio is in financials, mostly through ETFs. So I want to think through what could happen, and what it means for how I invest.

How a bank actually makes money (traditionally)

Before we talk about what could change, it helps to understand the basic engine of a bank.

A bank borrows money from you and lends it to someone else. When you put money in a savings account or fixed deposit, you are effectively lending to the bank. The bank then lends that money out as mortgages, car loans and business loans.

The bank wants to pay you as little interest as possible, and charge borrowers as much as it reasonably can. The difference is its profit. This gap, measured as a percentage of what the bank lends and invests, is called the net interest margin, or NIM.

There is another layer.

Deposits are short-term money. You can withdraw your savings anytime, and fixed deposits usually last only months. Loans tend to be long-term. A mortgage can run 25 or 30 years. So the bank borrows short and lends long.

Usually, long-term interest rates are higher than short-term rates. If you plot interest rates against how long the money is borrowed for, you get what is called the yield curve.

When the curve is steep, the bank earns a fat spread. When it flattens, margins get squeezed. When it inverts, with short-term rates above long-term rates, the business becomes very hard to run profitably. Imagine paying 4% on deposits and lending out at 3%.

A nuance for Singapore banks

In practice, our local banks don’t fit this textbook picture neatly.

Many of their loans, such as mortgages and corporate loans, are floating-rate. They reset quickly when interest rates change. Meanwhile, a lot of money sits in current and savings accounts that pay very little.

So for DBS, OCBC and UOB, profits tend to move with the overall level of interest rates as much as with the slope of the curve. When rates are high, loan income rises quickly while deposit costs lag behind. When rates fall, margins shrink.

DBS shows this clearly.

In 2021, when rates were near zero, it guided for a net interest margin of 1.45% to 1.50%. By 2023, after the rate hikes, its margin had risen to 2.15% and its net profit crossed S$10 billion for the first time. Same bank, same business, very different earnings. That is the interest rate cycle at work.

Margins aren’t everything: volume, funding and bad loans

A thin margin doesn’t automatically mean a bad year for a bank.

Central banks raise rates when the economy is running hot. Short-term rates go up, and long-term rates may not rise as much, so the margin narrows. But a hot economy also means more people and businesses want to borrow. A bank can make up for thinner margins by lending more. Volume matters.

How much a bank can lend is limited by how much funding it has, and deposits are the main source.

When a bank wants to grow faster than its deposits allow, it can borrow from other places, such as short-term loans from other banks and institutions. This is often called wholesale funding. It usually costs more and is less stable than ordinary deposits.

A bank that is hungry for profits, perhaps because shareholders demand growth, may lean on this. It works well in good times. It is also what hurts the most when the downturn comes.

The real test is the down cycle

Banks are tested in recessions, not booms. The question then is: who did you lend to, and can they still pay you back when times are tough?

A good loan isn’t one where the borrower never struggles. It is one where the borrower struggles but still repays.

Many Singapore investors today have not lived through a proper credit cycle. We did have a recession in 2020, but bad loans never really spiked, because loan moratoriums and government support absorbed much of the damage. It would be unusual to go 20 years without a downturn that actually bites.

If you look at banks that have survived 100 years or more, including many US regional banks, they usually have one thing in common. They have a disciplined way of deciding who to lend to, built up over decades, almost like a standard operating procedure. That conservatism costs them growth in good times. It is also why they are still around.

So as an investor, you have to ask yourself: do you prefer a bank that plays the long game? Or one that believes it is good enough to play the long game and the short game at the same time?

The real moat: lazy money

I think this is where most would underestimate the part for some disruption.

The big three local banks have a huge advantage that has little to do with clever lending. People trust them, and people don’t move their money.

Think about your own savings. Most of it probably sits where it has always been. Not because that is the best rate available, but because moving money is a chore. You would need to open a new account, verify your identity, set up transfers, and maybe change where your salary goes. Most people don’t bother.

I think of this as lazy money, and banks earn a lot from it. Because their deposits don’t move, the big banks can pay less interest than they would otherwise need to. Smaller players such as Sing Investments & Finance or Singapura Finance have to offer more attractive rates to win deposits.

Friction is part of the moat.

When my fellow executive directors at Bigscribe, Alvin and Thomas, and I went to close our company bank account, parts of the process still required a trip to the branch. Even today, some of banking is surprisingly old-school.

What happened when rates went up

The 2022 to 2023 rate hike cycle gives us a preview of what happens when people do start moving their money.

September 2022: UOB raised its 12-month fixed deposit rate to 2.6% and OCBC to 2.3%, while DBS kept its top rate at 1.3%. People queued at bank branches, some for hours.
December 2022: The 6-month Singapore T-bill cut-off yield hit 4.4%, with S$9.3 billion of applications for a S$4.6 billion issue.
Early 2023: OCBC offered 4.08% on an 8-month fixed deposit.
Mid-2023: OCBC and UOB cut their rates to 2.70% once deposit outflows had stabilised and they no longer needed cash as urgently.

Two things stand out.

First, DBS largely stayed out of the promotional race and still posted record profits. It had the stickiest deposits, so it didn’t need to pay up. That is the moat working.

Second, the promotions were short and targeted. Banks raised rates when they needed money and cut them as soon as they had enough. This only works because most people don’t watch rates constantly. Keep that in mind. It becomes important later.

What are “rails”?

People in finance and tech talk about rails a lot. It is a useful idea, so let me explain it simply.

Rails are the systems that move something from one place to another. Think of a railway track. The track itself doesn’t do much. But once it exists, trains run on it, towns grow around the stations, and a lot of activity happens because things can now move easily.

In finance, rails move money and information. They have evolved over time:

Paper and post: cheques and letters, sent and processed by hand.
Telephone and telex: instructions given over the phone or wire.
Digital networks: SWIFT for international transfers, and GIRO, FAST and PayNow for local ones.

Each step made moving money faster and cheaper.

Another way to picture it: rails are like roads.

Today, the banks own most of the roads and the toll booths. Switching banks is like leaving the expressway, finding a new route and paying a new toll. It is a hassle, so most people stay on the road they are on.

Rails are more than pipes

Good rails don’t just move things. They also handle what goes wrong.

For an online travel agency, the hard part isn’t showing you a list of hotels. It is dealing with disputes. The hotel overbooked. Your flight was delayed and you need to cancel. You want a refund.

For banking, the hard part is trust and safety. Will all my money arrive? Is it going to the right person? If something goes wrong, who fixes it? Is the place receiving my money safe?

So when people talk about building better rails, they mean building a better supply chain for money. Faster and cheaper, but still trustworthy when things go wrong.

What’s quietly happening on the rails

Blockchain and DeFi were hottest around 2020 and 2021.

Five years later, it might look like not much has happened, at least at our local banks. The most visible change is that you can now buy and hold some digital currencies through bank platforms.

But quite a lot has happened below the surface. It just isn’t aimed at you and me. Most of it is about rebuilding the business-to-business (B2B) rails: how banks, companies and institutions move money and assets between each other.

A few examples:

DBS Token Services. Launched in 2024 for institutional clients. Its core product, Treasury Tokens, are essentially tokenized deposits that allow round-the-clock cross-border payments between DBS branches. For a company’s finance team, this means moving cash between, say, its Singapore and Hong Kong subsidiaries on a Sunday night, and building rules into how payments happen.
Partior. A blockchain payments network formed by JPMorgan, DBS and Temasek, which grew out of MAS’s Project Ubin. It lets banks settle cross-border payments in multiple currencies in real time, with both sides of a currency exchange settling at the same moment.
Project Guardian. MAS’s collaboration with the industry to test tokenized assets such as bonds, funds and foreign exchange. It is a testing ground, not a regulation.

What does “tokenized” mean? It simply means recording who owns something on a blockchain instead of a traditional database.

Take a company like ST Engineering.

It has a fixed number of shares, and each share is a record of who owns a slice of the company. Long ago, that record was kept on paper. Today, it sits in a digital database.

A blockchain is just another kind of database, one that many parties can share and trust without needing a single central record-keeper. So moving share ownership onto a blockchain is not as wild as it sounds.

It’s not just Singapore

The same thing is happening overseas, at banks big and small.

The best-known example is JPMorgan, the largest US bank.

It runs a blockchain unit called Kinexys (formerly Onyx). Its deposit token, JPM Coin (ticker JPMD), is a digital version of US dollar deposits held at JPMorgan. It went live for institutional clients in November 2025 on Base, a public blockchain network built by Coinbase, and settles almost instantly, around the clock.

In October 2026, it was also made available on Ethereum. Only clients that JPMorgan has approved can hold it.

Citi, BNY and others have similar products. But this creates a new problem.

Why banks need shared rails

A JPMorgan deposit token is a claim on JPMorgan. It can only move between JPMorgan’s own clients. A Citi token can only move between Citi’s clients.

Think of it like store vouchers. A voucher from one shopping mall is useful inside that mall, but you can’t spend it next door. If a company keeps money with five banks, it now holds five kinds of vouchers that can’t talk to each other.

Say a company wants to move US$100 million from its Citi tokens to JPMorgan tokens. Today, it would have to cash out the Citi tokens, wire the dollars to JPMorgan the old way, and then ask JPMorgan to issue new tokens. That defeats much of the point.

So banks are now building shared networks, so that tokens from different banks can be swapped in a single step. In the US, there are two to know about: one for the giants, and one for the regional banks.

The big banks’ network: The Clearing House

The Clearing House is a payments company owned by the large US banks. It already runs two of America’s core payment systems, RTP for instant payments and CHIPS for large transfers, which together clear and settle more than US$2 trillion a day.

In June 2026, it announced a shared network for tokenised deposits, backed by banks including JPMorgan, Bank of America, Citi and Wells Fargo.

Around 17 large banks are now behind it, and it is expected to open to banks of all sizes in the first half of 2027.

In September 2026, it picked a technology firm called Quant to build it.

How it is meant to work, in simple terms:

Each bank still issues its own tokens and looks after its own customers’ wallets.
A shared, permissioned ledger connects all the banks. “Permissioned” means only approved institutions can join, unlike public blockchains where anyone can take part.
When a token moves from one bank to another, the actual dollars settle over RTP or CHIPS at the same time.

So what is the result?

That US$100 million move becomes one instruction instead of three steps, any time of day.

Payments can also be programmed to happen automatically when certain conditions are met, such as paying a supplier the moment goods are delivered.

The regional banks’ network: Cari Network

This is the one I find more interesting, because it shows what smaller banks are doing to avoid being left behind.

Cari Network is being built by five US regional banks:

Bank	Total assets
Huntington Bancshares	US$225 billion
M&T Bank	US$214 billion
KeyCorp	US$184 billion
First Horizon	US$84 billion
Old National	US$72 billion

Together, they hold roughly US$780 billion in assets. That sounds big, but each is a fraction of JPMorgan’s size.

Cari is led by Gene Ludwig, a former US Comptroller of the Currency, which is the top regulator of America’s national banks. So it has serious regulatory credibility behind it.

A few things make it different:

One shared token for all the banks. Instead of five sets of vouchers, there is one token that works the same at every member bank. You get it through your own bank, but a token from Huntington is identical to one from M&T. The network controls how many tokens exist on behalf of all members.
Private, but checkable. Only approved participants can use it, and transactions are kept private, while regulators can still audit activity when needed. It runs on Prividium, a permissioned network built on ZKsync technology and anchored to Ethereum.
Starting small. At first, money can only move between customers of the five banks. The plan was a basic working version by March 2026, a pilot with customers in the third quarter of 2026, and full commercial launch by December 2026.

Why banks are doing this

The short answer: to protect their deposits.

Stablecoins such as USDT and USDC are digital dollars issued by companies, not banks. When you hold them, your money is no longer a deposit in a bank.

A January 2026 Standard Chartered report estimated that US banks could lose US$500 billion in deposits to stablecoins by 2028, with regional banks hit hardest.

The banks think tokenized deposits is the answer.

You get the speed of a stablecoin, but your money stays a regular bank deposit.
It stays on the bank’s balance sheet, it can still be covered by deposit insurance, and the bank can still lend it out.
With a stablecoin, the backing money usually sits in government bonds instead, and the bank earns nothing from it.

You can notice two things.

First, the giants can build their own tokens, while the regional banks have chosen to team up. That is the “plug in rather than build alone” pattern I mentioned earlier.

Second, there is an irony here.

These networks are meant to keep money inside banks, but if moving a deposit from one bank to another becomes a single instruction, it also becomes easier for money to leave your bank for a competitor. The banks may be protecting the banking system’s deposits while weakening each individual bank’s lazy-money moat.

How big is this today?

I think its not that big yet.

DBS doesn’t publish volumes for Token Services. The best public benchmark comes from Citi, whose similar token service handles about US$1 billion in transactions, though Citi didn’t say over what period. That is tiny compared with the trillions banks move through traditional channels.

Most Project Guardian pilots have been limited to accredited and institutional investors, and tokenised money-market funds are the most common live use case. MAS’s proposed shared ledger for tokenised assets, Global Layer One, is still in development, with first production use expected around 2026 to 2027.

Slow markets do change eventually, though.

Bond trading stayed old-school, with deals done over phone and chat, long after stock trading went electronic. That has been shifting in recent years.

The rails often change quietly first, and ordinary customers like us only notice it years later.

It’s a bit like the ATM. Before it came along, you had to visit a branch and queue to take out cash. Then one day, you didn’t.

A lesson from the travel industry

To see how AI could change finance, it may help to look at an industry where it is already shaking things up.

For years, if you wanted a hotel, you went to Booking.com, Agoda or Expedia. These sites, called online travel agencies (OTAs), give you one place to compare thousands of hotels. They earn a commission, called a take rate, on each booking. Much of their value came from the website or app itself: the screen you were used to searching on.

AI agents may change that. An AI agent is an assistant that doesn’t just answer questions but takes action for you. You tell it what you want, and it searches, compares and books the hotel.

In September 2026, Meta’s AI agent Muse began letting users plan and book hotels. On 23 September, Expedia fell 7.7%, Airbnb 7.6% and Booking Holdings 5.1% in a single day. Investors feared that if an agent can understand what a traveller wants, compare options across many sources and complete the booking, the travel agency gets cut out.

There is a weird part to the sell off LOL.

The selloff was triggered by Expedia joining Muse, so that users could book Expedia’s hotels without ever visiting Expedia’s site. And Meta reportedly plans to charge a commission on purchases made through Muse.

Going with an agent may not remove the middleman. The new middleman may be Muse.

Is it the shop or the service?

The real question for any platform is this: strip away the interface, and what value is left?

Imagine hotels connecting directly to AI agents through a common standard, paying a lower commission than the OTAs charge. If an OTA’s only value was the listing and the search box, its business is in trouble.

But OTAs also do things that are hard to replace. If the hotel messes up your booking, someone has to handle the complaint. If your flight is delayed and you need to cancel, someone has to process the refund. If you booked directly and the hotel doesn’t respond, was saving a few dollars still worth it? For many people, that service is what the commission really pays for.

The same logic applies elsewhere. A property portal whose only value is its listings becomes less important if the government opens up more property data that AI agents can access directly.

So the test is simple. Are you the shop, or are you the service?

Now apply this to your bank

Let’s bring this back to deposits.

Remember how banks offered short, targeted promotions in 2022 and 2023, then cut rates once they had enough cash? That only works because most savers don’t check rates every week, and moving money is a hassle.

Now imagine the next time rates go up.

Instead of reading blog posts comparing fixed deposit rates, I simply ask my AI agent:

find me the highest deposit rate among the banks and finance companies I’m comfortable with, check that they are financially sound, and move S$50,000 there.

The agent searches, compares and starts the transfer. When a better rate appears three months later, it moves the money again.

What used to be a high switching cost becomes a low one. Lazy money becomes alert money.

The banks’ dilemma

What can the banks do?

They can pay higher rates to keep deposits. But that eats directly into the net interest margin that made them so profitable in the first place.

The short-burst promotion also stops working. If agents are watching rates all the time, a bank can’t pay up for a few months and then quietly cut. It has to stay competitive across the board.

We have already seen how fast money moves once the friction is gone. In March 2023, customers pulled US$42 billion out of Silicon Valley Bank in a single day, in what has been described as the first US bank run in a world of online withdrawals. That was panic, not rate-chasing. But it showed that deposits are only as sticky as the effort it takes to move them.

The flip side

This isn’t only bad news for the big banks. A large bank that builds these new rails early could capture volume it never could before, from customers locally and overseas. Lower friction cuts both ways. It also makes it easier for money to flow in.

Why it’s not that simple

Before we can conclude that the big banks are going to get their lunch eaten, there may be some important frictions that won’t disappear easily.

Trust still matters

Moving money is always a trade-off between how much you earn and how much you trust where it goes. Many people will accept a slightly lower rate to keep their savings with a bank they know.

But how much trust do you actually need?

In Singapore, the Deposit Insurance Scheme covers Singapore-dollar deposits up to S$100,000 per depositor at each full bank or finance company. The limit was raised from S$75,000 in April 2024, and all full banks and finance companies are members unless MAS exempts them.

So for most retail savers, the safety gap between DBS and a smaller finance company is narrower than many people assume. A good AI agent would likely point this out.

The agent is the front door, not the rail

Let’s walk through how this would actually work.

Say my agent finds that Singapura Finance offers the best rate. It pulls up the company’s track record, how well capitalized it is, and whether my deposit would be insured. I approve, and the transfer happens.

The money still travels over existing rails, such as PayNow or FAST, from my DBS account to Singapura Finance.

The chatbot is just a new front door. Behind it, the banks still do the heavy lifting: checking where the money came from (source of funds), how the person built their wealth (source of wealth), and screening for fraud. That responsibility, and the risk that comes with it, stays with the institutions.

More volume means more cost

If agents send a flood of new deposits to a small player like Singapura Finance, can it cope?

More customers also means more exposure to fraud and cyberattacks. To capture the opportunity, smaller institutions will need to invest in systems, compliance and security. That eats into their advantage.

Fast money can also leave fast. In March 2025, Chocolate Finance suspended instant withdrawals after a rush of requests, triggered by a poorly communicated change to its rewards programme Customers’ money was not lost, and the firm processed over S$500 million in withdrawals within a week. But it showed how quickly sentiment can turn when moving money is easy.

The middle still costs something

I think many people are too optimistic about how cheap things will become. They imagine the middleman disappears and fees fall to almost nothing. But there are real costs in the middle of every supply chain: handling disputes, making sure things work, meeting regulations.

It’s like a warranty on your phone. Some people happily skip it. But when the outcome is uncertain and costly, many of us want that protection, and that is part of what we pay for.

Wise is a good example of what real disruption looks like. Sending money overseas through a bank used to cost around 3% or more once you include fees and exchange rate markups. Wise brought that down dramatically. Its average cross-border fee fell to 0.50% in the quarter to June 2026, its lowest ever (Wise). Much lower, but still not zero.

What happened next is the interesting part.

Banks started using Wise as their rails. Standard Chartered now runs its SC Remit service on Wise’s infrastructure, and other partners include Morgan Stanley, Google Pay, Monzo and Nubank.

Two details are worth noting:

Wise doesn’t use blockchain or stablecoins. It built a cheaper, compliant network on conventional rails. Disruption is about better rails, not necessarily crypto.
Wise now holds US$41.2 billion in customer balances. That is money people would once have kept in a bank. It is a small but real sign of deposits quietly moving away from traditional banks.

Who builds the new rails?

When people hear “decentralised finance”, they often picture the extreme version.

Here is what DeFi looks like in practice. You take S$5,000 from your DBS account and convert it into a digital currency. You move it onto a blockchain such as Ethereum or Solana, and possibly onto a faster “layer 2” network built on top of them. There, you put it into a pool that lends to others or helps people trade, and you earn a yield.

Many people lost a lot of money doing this. Some losses came from token prices collapsing, a bit like holding a currency that loses half its value and never recovers. Others came from hacks, bugs in the code, and outright collapses such as Terra/Luna in 2022. Unsurprisingly, many people don’t trust DeFi.

But the change I’m describing doesn’t require everyone to move to DeFi. It is an evolution, not a leap.

A more likely path

A more realistic scenario looks like this. A company with a profitable core business builds better rails on the side. Other institutions, especially smaller ones, see the advantage of plugging in.

The players most likely to do this are challengers such as SoFi in the US and Nubank in Latin America. They have always tried to take business from the incumbents. They are big enough to set standards, but not so dominant that others are afraid to join.

Imagine one of them, or someone like them, creates an open standard: a common way for banks, finance companies and AI agents to connect. Other institutions see little risk in trying it. As more join, the network becomes more useful, which attracts even more members. That is a network effect. Then one day, someone at a big bank realises: we have a real problem.

It doesn’t even need to be a giant.

Picture a local firm like Chocolate Finance, which already has a tech team. Or even Providend.

Suppose I had an idea for a better way to move and manage money.

Building it isn’t as hard as it used to be. We bring in a few close partners. We explain it well and educate people on the safety and integrity questions they care about. The reviews are good, more people join, and it slowly chips away at someone else’s margins.

Evolution, not disruption

To be fair, I don’t think “disruption” is quite the right word. Finance has always evolved. We used to need more bank branches. Now we need fewer. Some of today’s experiments will become tomorrow’s standard rails, and we will stop noticing them.

History also suggests that incumbents often adapt and benefit. Better rails create new products to sell and new fees to earn. Big banks in the US, Singapore and elsewhere may move more volume and protect their profits that way. So it is genuinely hard to say who wins and who loses.

What I would say is this: don’t be surprised if, once these rails exist, deposits at the big banks start to shrink.

What this means for my portfolio

So why does any of this matter to me?

Even though most of my money is in exchange-traded funds (ETFs), around 20 to 25% of my portfolio ends up in financials with the ETFs.

Financials is a broad bucket. It includes traditional banks, small regional banks, newer players like SoFi and Nubank in tiny amounts, and insurers and specialty insurers, which are a whole different business that I know less about.

One specific worry: my Avantis Global Small Cap Value fund holds a number of smaller US regional banks. If these changes play out, some of them may need to merge, and a few could be badly hurt.

I have spent the past couple of years building tools with AI and seeing the friction in wealth and asset management up close.

I can see the potential.

But I honestly can’t tell whether this makes the overall pie for financial firms bigger or smaller.

Build a strategy that doesn’t need you to be right

After many years of investing, here is what I have learned: I can have opinions, but they are often wrong.

So I would rather not build a portfolio whose fate depends on whether I call this correctly. I expect some parts of my portfolio to be disrupted, including parts I currently feel confident about. That’s fine, as long as the overall plan still works.

If disruption never reaches traditional finance, a concentrated bank portfolio will do fine. But what if it does? Do you want sleepless nights because 80% of your portfolio sits in three banks?

Singapore REIT investors have been through something similar. Many were confident that blue-chip REITs would keep doing a splendid job. Then interest rates rose sharply from 2022, and many REITs fell a lot, even those with good management. You can debate some of those management teams, but the lesson is the same: good management can’t fight large forces.

That is why a broad ETF makes sense to me here. I don’t have to pick the winners. If the incumbents adapt, I own them. If the challengers win, I own some of them too.

The goal isn’t to predict the future. It is to build a wealth or income strategy that turns out reasonably well whether my opinions are right or wrong.

Kyith is the Owner and Sole Writer behind Investment Moats. Readers tune in to Investment Moats to learn and build stronger, firmer wealth foundations, how to have a Passive investment strategy, know more about investing in REITs and the nuts and bolts of Active Investing.

Readers also follow Kyith to learn how to plan well for Financial Security and Financial Independence.

Kyith worked as an IT operations engineer from 2004 to 2019. Currently, he works as a Senior Solutions Specialist in Fee-only Wealth Advisory Firm Providend. All opinions on Investment Moats are his own and does not represent the views of Providend.

You can view Kyith’s current portfolio here, which uses his Free Google Stock Portfolio Tracker.

His investment broker of choice is Interactive Brokers, which allows him to invest in securities from different exchanges all over the world, at very low commission rates, without custodian fees, near spot currency rates.

You can read more about Kyith here.