There is something magical, in a way, about the perfect old house. The kind where the stone walls have stood for four hundred years, but there is a warm kitchen at the heart of it and great glass doors that open onto the garden.
The old beams are still there. They are dark and heavy and marked by time, but they contrast elegantly with the rough stone walls, built from rocks that you can sense were pulled with care from the creek out back and laid by hand all those centuries ago. The rooms are bright now. The kitchen is new. The old fireplace has been cleaned and burns again. There is good furniture, soft light and a walk-in shower where four hundred years ago there was probably a bucket.
Someone has taken care of it. Many someones, in fact, over its long and storied existence. Where something could be saved, they saved it. Where something needed to change, they changed it. The old and the new coming together to create, more or less, the dream.
On the surface, at least.
When you go to hang your new TV or plug your phone in next to the bed, you are reminded that the house was built centuries before anyone imagined that every room would need electricity. The wiring that does exist could, in some cases, be described as slightly haphazard. Wires and sockets and switches patched and repatched, some hanging on for dear life by what little remains of their frayed ends.
And suddenly those beautiful old walls are hiding a problem. The house needs to be rewired.
As we were putting this edition of the magazine together, we kept finding this theme of new being appended to old and the need to devise more permanent solutions coming up over and over again. Stablecoins are probably the most obvious example. For decades, we have moved money in much the same way, and now there is a serious question about whether some of those systems are still the best ones for the job. In financing, too, there is a mix of old and new. Warehouse finance is hardly a new invention, but it is finding new uses as the market looks for better ways to get money where it is needed. Then there is AI, which is changing the way that we do, well, just about everything. That raises its own questions about what we change and what we keep. The article on the Great Transfer looks at the huge amount of knowledge and experience that could soon walk out the door as one generation leaves the workforce, just as machines are being asked to make more decisions themselves. If we are going to rewire the industry, we need to be careful not to lose some of the things that have kept the lights on all these years.
None of this is a criticism of past leaders. To fault the visionaries of yesteryear for not building architecture for an AI-powered future would be akin to criticising the Genoese merchants of the fifteenth century for not anticipating email when they were devising the letter of credit, or the stonemason building our house four hundred years ago for failing to consider where the EV charger would go.
It is worth remembering that those frustratingly outdated systems we are forced to deal with today are indeed the very reason we are here at all. The systems we now talk about modernising have supported generations of trade, moved extraordinary amounts of money, and adapted again and again (and again) as the world changed around them. And there is a reason they have lasted.
The job now is to build on them and make sure the tools and systems we need to rely on have the ability to take us where we are going next. Wherever that might be.
That does not mean tearing the house down.
But if we want to keep living in it, it is time it gets rewired.
