The Joy of Healthy Money: Putting customer's financial health at the heart of banking with Alistair Campbell

In this episode David Cox talks to Alistair Campbell about his book "Healthy Money" and the challenges facing banking.

Campbell, with experience at Standard Chartered, HSBC, NatWest, and in telecom and microfinance, argues banks are structurally disconnected from customers because products, architecture, and leadership prioritize balance-sheet needs, reinforced by cyclical profitability tied to interest rates and regulators’ focus on bank resilience.

Using a “corporate midlife crisis” analogy, they discuss banks dabbling in AI and digital assets without rethinking purpose. Campbell proposes banks shift from reducing friction to engaging customers’ financial lives, redesigning services for modern, complex, and precarious realities (blended families, side hustles, gig work, longer retirements) and evolving architecture from account-centric systems to customer data custodianship that supports relationships, verification, and habits.

They discuss threats from Apple Wallet and other non-banks, trust tradeoffs, early legacy-bank efforts to measure financial health, and AI’s potential to become a personal CFO if banks adapt.