Chris Shayan's Blog

Democratizing Intelligence

The “Cloud Tax” is Killing Your AI Strategy. Why the Future of Banking is on the Edge.

We are living through the “Peak Hype” phase of Enterprise AI. Every board meeting in the financial sector currently ends with the same mandate: “We need AI in every workflow.” But as CIOs and Enterprise Architects move from glossy PowerPoints to actual production (at least the ones that are not graphic designers & care about doing the work), they are hitting a massive, invisible wall. I call it the Cloud Tax.

Th...

The AI Maturity Model for Banking

For the banking sector, AI has transitioned from a “horizon technology” to an operational imperative. However, the gap between having AI initiatives and being an AI-mature organization is widening. While fintech disruptors often start at a high maturity level due to their lack of legacy debt, traditional financial institutions face a complex journey.

Drawing upon the Gartner AI Maturity Model, this article provides a framework to objectively assess your bank’s current AI capabilities and engineer...

Why the Invisible Bank Unifies Your AI, Data Mesh, and CLV Strategy

Assembling the Pieces of a Puzzle

Your Chief Data Officer is building a Data Mesh. Your Head of AI is prototyping an “Idea Machine” to drive Customer Lifetime Value (CLV). Your Head of Digital is designing “augmented” co-pilots for your bankers. Each is a powerful, expensive, and critical initiative. And each is destined to hit a hard ceiling — or fail outright — unless they are recognized as components of a single, unified destination.

For too long, we have been building the engine, the plumbing,...

The Idea Machine and the Future of Finance

Part 1 — Sustainable Growth from Nobel Ideas to AI

In this post:

AI, The Core Engine of Financial ValueCreative Destruction at an Unprecedented ScaleThe Agentic Revolution. Reshaping Core Banking and Customer Relationships.Re-engineering the Bank. AI-Powered Operational TransformationBuilding the “AI-Ready” Bank

The arrival of AI is not merely another wave of digitization; it is a profound economic shock. For the financial services sector, AI is forcing a reckoning that can only be understood throu...

Sustainable Growth from Nobel Ideas to AI

If there is one theme that has defined my own professional journey, it is an abiding fascination with growth. Anyone who has followed my work — from shaping financial products at a national scale to driving value in private equity and enabling high-impact ventures — will have seen a constant thread: a drive to push for growth that is both financially sound and experientially meaningful. I have always been keen on finding ways to build systems and elevate human experiences that result in sustaina...

From Cloud-Bound LLMs to On-Device LSA Small Language Models

The current state of our pursuit of AI is, ironically, anchored to a fundamentally fragile and unsustainable architectural pattern: the monolithic, cloud-bound LLM. We are in a “mainframe” paradigm. These models, while providing a necessary, catalytic surge in capabilities, represent a technological adolescence. They are, in essence, brittle, power-hungry, economically non-linear, and beholden to a “brittle giant” architecture that treats intelligence as a stateless, high-latency utility.

As a st...

Architecting AI with Meta Cybernetics to Elevate Experiences

AI has long been defined by its capacity for intelligence — pattern recognition, problem-solving, and strategic planning. Yet, as AI permeates every facet of our lives, a fundamental gap persists: the absence of genuine subjective experience, or sentience. This article proposes a radical shift from merely sapient (intelligent) to fully integrated sapient-sentient AI, leveraging a meta-cybernetic framework for its architecture. By designing systems capable of affective homeostasis and cognitive s...

1:1 Meetings Are Bullshit: A Manifesto for Meaningful Connection

Gemini Generated.

Let’s be honest with each other. The weekly 1:1 meeting — that sacred cow of modern management, evangelized by HR departments and dutifully dropped into our calendars like a recurring digital headache — is bullshit. I am not against having a good, deep coffee talk that is spontaneous.

It is a soul-crushing waste of high-value time. It is a relic of an industrial-era mindset where managers, like factory foremen, had to physically check the human machinery to ensure it was function...

One Year of Innovation: How the Backbase AI Center in Vietnam is Redefining Banking’s Future

It’s remarkable how quickly a bold vision can become a tangible reality. Just one year ago, we officially launched the Backbase AI Center here in the heart of Ho Chi Minh City. Our mission was ambitious: to build a world-class hub that would harness the power of artificial intelligence to solve the most complex challenges in banking. Today, on our first anniversary, I couldn’t be prouder to reflect on our journey, celebrate our key achievements, and share our vision for what’s next. This center ...

The Future of Banking is Invisible

From frustrating clicks to an AI that manages it all. Welcome to the Invisible Bank.

Why Your Bank Is Still a Chore

Think about the last time you managed your money. Was it empowering? Or was it a cascade of logins, endless clicks, and a lingering anxiety that you missed something? For most of us, banking is a chore. It’s a series of frustrating tasks we have to do, not a system that works for us. We’re buried in paperwork, confused by jargon, and left feeling that we’re always a step behind.

This ...