Finance revolves around trust and much of the growth in finance over the years has been built on methods to scale it. Grand banking halls were an early innovation, designed to signal to customers that the bank would still be there in the morning and that their money is safe. In some cultures, financial services providers allied themselves to religion to leverage the trust available there – the pawnbroking industry, for example, sprang up in the Buddhist monasteries of China. More recently, central clearinghouses, credit scoring and deposit insurance are all technologies the finance industry has invented to scale trust. Clearinghouses substitute the need to trust any particular counterparty with trust in a single centralised entity. Credit scoring makes the process of underwriting trust in a consumer much more efficient. And deposit insurance eliminates the need for depositors to undertake due diligence on the financial condition of their bank. 

Yet despite the progress, we’re a long wa…