What your money can actually do, and how many ways it can do it

There is a difference between having money and being able to use it.

Most of the time, that difference is invisible. Your salary arrives, bills are paid, international transfers go through, and the banking system works quietly in the background.

Because it usually works, we tend to assume that access is permanent.

But access is a service provided by institutions, and those institutions can decide to stop providing it.

In one recent financial year, British banks closed 453,230 customer accounts. A decade earlier, the figure was 45,091.

The increase is striking, but the deeper question is not whether every closure was justified.

It is how much financial independence depends on relationships that can be withdrawn for reasons the customer may not fully understand.

This week, we begin the third and final research series of THRIVE IN CHAOS.

The first series examined why the old economic arrangement is coming apart. The second investigated the physical infrastructure on which modern economies depend.

Series III turns the analysis toward the decision-maker.

What happens when systems that once provided reliable access and flexibility begin transferring the responsibility for maintaining alternatives to individuals, businesses, investors and governments?

We begin with payment access because almost every other option depends on it.

A second supplier is not useful if you cannot pay them.

A country is not a practical business destination if you cannot maintain banking access there.

And capital is not immediately available if transferring it takes longer than the decision allows.

Imagine a company that maintains three banking relationships.

Its management may reasonably believe that the business has diversified its financial operations.

But international payments do not always move directly from one bank to another.

They often rely on correspondent banks, which provide settlement services to institutions that do not maintain their own presence in a particular country.

If all three banks rely on the same correspondent, the company may have three relationships but only one effective route.

That distinction becomes important when a bank changes its compliance policy or withdraws from a particular payment corridor.

The underlying network has been contracting for years.

According to the international settlement data examined in our research, active correspondent banking relationships declined by approximately 22% between 2011 and 2019 and by around 30% between 2011 and 2022.

The decline was not evenly distributed.

Advanced economies experienced an average reduction of approximately 23%, while parts of the Pacific and Caribbean lost a substantially greater share of their relationships.

The regions with the fewest alternatives were often the ones losing access fastest.

This is the central infrastructure problem.

Financial access can become more concentrated even while the number of consumer-facing payment services increases.

Over the same period, payment technology has improved substantially.

Instant domestic transfers have expanded. Specialist cross-border providers have made many international transactions easier. Mobile payment acceptance has increased, and new settlement technologies have emerged.

These improvements are real.

For many ordinary transactions, consumers and businesses have more convenient options than they did ten years ago.

But convenience and independence are different properties.

A payment application may have its own interface, pricing and customer support while relying on a traditional bank to hold funds or settle transactions.

If that underlying banking relationship ends, the application may lose the ability to serve its customers.

Several apparently competing providers may also depend on the same institution.

This creates a form of correlated operational risk that is difficult for customers to identify.

It also means that a financial system can offer more ways to initiate payments while becoming increasingly dependent on fewer institutions to complete them.

The United Kingdom offers a particularly visible example of how financial access can be withdrawn.

Banks closed 453,230 customer accounts in one recent financial year, compared with 45,091 a decade earlier.

Some closures may involve legitimate concerns about financial crime, fraud or regulatory compliance.

Others reflect commercial decisions about whether a relationship is sufficiently profitable or inexpensive to assess.

The distinction matters because the economic consequences for customers can be significant regardless of the bank's motivation.

A household may lose access to an account used for receiving income and paying essential expenses.

A small company may be unable to invoice customers, pay suppliers or operate normally while establishing a replacement relationship.

From 28 April 2026, Britain introduced stronger protections for certain account closures.

The new rules require ninety days' notice rather than sixty, along with written reasons for the decision.

Immediate closure remains possible in circumstances involving suspected financial crime.

However, the rules apply only to accounts opened on or after 28 April 2026.

This limitation illustrates an important feature of institutional reform.

A protection may be introduced in response to an existing problem without necessarily applying to the customers who experienced that problem.

It also raises a second-order question.

If closing an established account becomes more difficult, banks may respond by refusing some relationships at the application stage.

That would move exclusion from account termination to account opening, making the problem harder to measure.

We expected the evidence on cash to show a straightforward decline.

Instead, the latest survey revealed a more complicated pattern.

In early 2026, 92% of euro-area companies with physical locations accepted cash, compared with 90% in 2024.

Card acceptance stood at 88%, while mobile payment acceptance had risen from 36% to 68% over the same period.

These figures do not support the claim that cash is rapidly disappearing from everyday commerce.

But other findings reveal pressure on the infrastructure supporting it.

Among companies that do not accept cash, the proportion citing difficulties depositing or withdrawing it increased from 22% in 2024 to 35% in 2026.

And among businesses operating self-checkout terminals, 48% accepted cash at none of those terminals.

The distinction is important.

Cash can remain legal and widely accepted while the practical process of obtaining, depositing and handling it becomes more inconvenient.

The formal option remains intact, but maintaining its usefulness requires more effort.

This pattern extends beyond payments.

An option may remain available in law, in official statistics and in the terms of a service while becoming increasingly difficult to exercise in practice.

That is one of the mechanisms Series III will investigate across its eight domains.

To examine this problem systematically, Series III introduces an instrument built around four questions.

1. Count — How many options genuinely survive inspection?

The relevant number is not how many alternatives can be named.

It is how many remain independent after their underlying dependencies are traced.

Two banks relying on the same correspondent may not represent two separate settlement routes.

2. Cost to hold — What does keeping an alternative available cost?

Maintaining a second banking relationship requires time, administration and potentially fees or minimum balances.

Those costs are real.

But they should be compared with the consequences of losing access to the primary route.

3. Expiry — When can the option disappear?

Some options have clear expiration dates.

Others remain available until a counterparty changes its policy or terminates a relationship.

The second category is particularly difficult to manage because the decision may be unexpected.

4. Control — Who decides whether the option remains available?

A customer can choose to maintain a bank account, but the bank generally retains substantial authority to terminate the relationship under applicable law.

The customer's control is therefore limited.

Applied to payment access, these four questions produce a distinctive result.

The cost of maintaining an alternative is often relatively low.

The number of genuinely independent routes may be smaller than expected.

And the decision to withdraw access is largely external.

That combination makes payment access an important area for deliberate resilience planning.

The article considers three scenarios rather than assuming that financial access will deteriorate in a straight line.

In the base scenario, payment technology continues improving while correspondent banking relationships gradually decline.

Most ordinary transactions become more convenient, but certain customers, industries and jurisdictions experience increasing difficulty maintaining access.

In the stress scenario, compliance restrictions expand to additional categories of customers.

A nationality, business sector, transaction pattern or jurisdiction may become more expensive for financial institutions to assess.

Closures or restrictions arrive across multiple providers, revealing that apparently independent alternatives share common infrastructure.

The extreme scenario concerns small states or territories losing their remaining correspondent relationships.

In such circumstances, financial assets continue to exist, but international settlement becomes difficult or unavailable.

Trade, remittances and business operations may be disrupted even without formal sanctions.

The important point is that the scenarios differ in the scale of the access problem, not in whether money continues to exist.

The research records four forecasts across different time horizons.

One year — end of 2027

We assign a 55% probability that at least one additional G7 jurisdiction will announce or enact requirements for bank-account closure notices and written reasons comparable to Britain's April 2026 rules.

Three years — end of 2029

We assign a 75% probability that active correspondent banking relationships will be lower at the end of 2029 than at the end of 2026.

Five years — end of 2031

We assign a 45% probability that at least one G7 country will establish a statutory right to a basic payment account that cannot be withdrawn solely on commercial grounds.

Ten years — end of 2036

We assign a 40% probability that cash acceptance among companies with physical locations will fall below 75% in at least one euro-area country.

These probabilities are analytical estimates, not statistically calibrated predictions.

Each forecast has a defined threshold and a specified method of resolution.

The objective is to create a framework that can be evaluated against future evidence.

The first step is to examine the actual ways you can receive income and make payments.

If your primary account stopped working tomorrow, could you continue paying essential expenses?

Would your second account provide genuinely different access, or would it face similar restrictions?

Within thirty days, identify your most important payment routes and the institutions on which they depend.

Over the following twelve months, consider maintaining a second ordinary banking or payment relationship that is lawful, reliable and sufficiently independent.

An alternative should remain active rather than being left unused indefinitely.

Maintaining a practical reserve for several weeks of essential expenses can also reduce the consequences of temporary access restrictions.

The objective is not to prepare for a general banking collapse.

It is to remain functional during a disruption affecting one institution or relationship.

Businesses should treat payment access as an operational dependency rather than a routine administrative function.

For each important international payment corridor, identify which institution actually provides settlement.

Review account termination provisions and understand how much notice would be available if a relationship ended.

Within sixty days, map critical payment flows and identify shared dependencies.

Within twelve months, establish an active alternative for the payment routes whose failure would interrupt operations.

This may involve maintaining a second banking relationship in a different jurisdiction, where appropriate and legally available.

Businesses should also ask payment providers about their own banking dependencies.

A provider that relies on one settlement institution can become a single point of failure for many customers.

For companies whose revenues depend on international payments, correspondent banking exposure can affect operating costs and profitability.

As settlement relationships become less available, transaction costs may increase, payments may take longer and working-capital requirements may rise.

These costs can gradually affect margins without being clearly identified as consequences of financial infrastructure concentration.

Investors evaluating payment providers should therefore distinguish customer growth and technological capability from the resilience of the underlying settlement arrangements.

A provider with many customers but one critical banking relationship may have substantial operational concentration.

The longer-term policy question concerns how compliance costs and liability are allocated.

Changes in those rules could determine which payment corridors remain commercially viable.

Series III adds a fourth audience to our research: territory.

For a small state, region or municipality, access to financial infrastructure can shape the viability of its economy.

Small countries are particularly vulnerable when correspondent banks withdraw because the remaining institutions may have limited commercial incentives to maintain relationships.

Governments need to understand how many independent international settlement routes serve their economies.

They should also consider how supervisory quality, transparency and reliable financial information can reduce the cost of maintaining those relationships.

For small states, financial access is not simply a banking-sector issue.

It can become a question of trade, investment and economic continuity.

Three developments would weaken the central argument.

The first would be a sustained recovery in correspondent banking relationships.

Two consecutive years of growth would suggest that the economics of maintaining those relationships had changed.

The second would be evidence that alternative payment systems can operate at meaningful scale without relying on the same underlying correspondent infrastructure.

That would represent genuine diversification rather than additional interfaces built on existing dependencies.

The third would be evidence that account closures are usually easy to reverse through appeals and reinstatement.

If access can be restored quickly and reliably, the economic cost of losing a primary relationship may be smaller than the article assumes.

These conditions matter because the purpose of the research is not to defend a predetermined conclusion.

It is to identify which evidence would justify changing it.

For decades, much of the flexibility that individuals and businesses relied upon was provided automatically by the surrounding system.

Payments worked, international suppliers could be reached, and financial institutions maintained the relationships required to support ordinary economic activity.

That infrastructure has not disappeared.

But parts of it are becoming more concentrated, more expensive to maintain and more dependent on decisions made by institutions outside the user's control.

The practical response is not to maximise the number of accounts or adopt increasingly complicated financial arrangements.

It is to understand the infrastructure behind the options you already have.

Count independent routes rather than institutions.

Measure the cost of keeping alternatives available.

Understand when access can expire.

And identify who controls the decision.

Financial resilience begins when we stop measuring only what we own and start measuring what we can actually do with it.

THRIVE IN CHAOS

Series III · Article 1 of 8

Four Hundred Thousand Doors

What Your Money Can Actually Do, and How Many Ways It Can Do It

Full research: thriveinchaos.ai

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