So, another tech prophet has descended from the mountain to tell us the future is coming and, shocker, we’re not ready for it. This time it’s Dr. Ozan Ozerk, a guy who went from being an ER doctor to a fintech mogul. He stood on a stage in Vilnius, at some summit with a "racing-inspired theme," and dropped the hammer with a line that became a headline: Ozan Ozerk on the Future of Fintech: "Do Nothing, and You Donate Advantage to Your Fastest Competitor".
Give me a break.
I’ve heard this speech a hundred times, just with different buzzwords. Replace "fintech" with "the cloud" or "social media" or "Web3," and it’s the same tired script. A charismatic founder paints a terrifying picture of a future that’s moving at light speed, a future where you’ll be left in the dust unless you buy what they’re selling. And Ozerk, with his portfolio of companies like OpenPayd and EMBank, is definitely selling.
It’s a classic playbook. Step one: Create the disease. Step two: Sell the cure. The disease is "being slow." The cure is a dizzying cocktail of instant payments, AI, and something called a "stablecoin sandwich." Sounds delicious.
The Doctor's Prescription for Panic
Let's look at the "prescription" Dr. Ozerk is writing for all these supposedly terrified Lithuanian businesses. He tells them they have 12 months to "switch on instant pay," adopt digital IDs, and "industrialise compliance." It sounds less like business advice and more like the frantic pre-flight checklist for a spaceship about to be sucked into a black hole.
He rattles off a laundry list of regulations and tech that reads like an IT department's nightmare: SEPA reforms, the Financial Data Access Regulation (FiDA), eIDAS 2.0, the GENIUS Act for stablecoins, FedNow, RTP. You get the feeling you’re supposed to be impressed, or maybe just overwhelmed. That’s the point. Confusion is a great motivator for hiring a consultant, or better yet, signing up for a service that handles it all for you.
This isn’t just advice. No, "advice" doesn't cover it—this is a masterclass in manufactured urgency. Ozerk, the former doctor, is diagnosing the entire global economy with a terminal case of slowness. The symptoms? Taking more than ten seconds to process a payment. The prognosis? Corporate death. The only treatment is his brand of high-speed, data-sharing, AI-driven finance. Convenient, isn't it?
The whole thing reminds me of those old infomercials. You know, the ones showing someone tragically failing to chop a tomato with a normal knife before a smiling host reveals a magical blade that can cut through a tin can. Are businesses really struggling this much? Are they all just sitting on their hands, blissfully unaware that their competitors are lapping them on some digital racetrack? Or is this just a really effective way to make people feel like they’re already losing a race they didn't even know they were in?
Fear, AI, and the Same Old Story
The cornerstone of this whole pitch is fear. That quote—"Doing nothing isn't neutral. It's giving your competitors a head start"—is pure, uncut corporate intimidation. It’s designed to echo in the heads of CEOs at 3 a.m. It frames inaction not as a strategic choice, but as a suicidal failure. And honestly...
Then comes the AI sermon. Ozerk calls it a "structural revolution," pointing to the $250 billion in private investment as proof. Of course, he tempers it with a dose of pragmatic-sounding wisdom: "Build for tomorrow, but not at the expense of today." What does that even mean? It’s the kind of empty platitude you’d find on a motivational poster in a soulless corporate lobby. It translates to: "Go ahead and spend a fortune on our futuristic AI solutions, but also, please don’t forget to pay your electricity bill." Thanks for the tip.
The part that really gets me is the assumption that every business needs to operate like a hyper-caffeinated day trader. This relentless obsession with speed—instant payments, instant settlement, instant everything—feels like a solution in search of a problem for 99% of the world. My local coffee shop doesn’t need to settle its wholesale bean order on the blockchain. My freelance graphic designer isn't going to lose a client because their invoice payment took 24 hours instead of ten seconds.
But this isn't about my coffee shop. It's about creating a new ecosystem where the gatekeepers, like Ozerk's companies, become indispensable. You can't play in the new super-fast sandbox without their special shovels and pails. Then again, maybe I'm the one who's out of touch. Maybe the world really is about to change so dramatically that anyone who can't process a cross-border transaction in the time it takes to sneeze is doomed. It just feels... exhausting. And offcourse, very profitable for the people selling the dream.
The irony is that this doctor-turned-financier is applying a medical model to business: diagnose, prescribe, and treat, a parallel he himself has explored in Dr Ozan Ozerk on Lessons from Medicine That Can Reshape Modern Finance. But in medicine, the goal is to restore a patient to a state of normal, healthy function. In this brand of fintech evangelism, the goal seems to be to redefine "normal" as a constant state of high-stakes, high-speed anxiety, a condition that requires perpetual treatment. And who benefits from a chronic illness? The one selling the medicine.
Just Another Sermon from the Mount
At the end of the day, what are we really looking at here? Strip away the jargon, the racing metaphors, and the fear-mongering, and you're left with a very smart guy telling everyone that the world is getting more complicated and they need his help to navigate it. It ain't a revolution; it's a sales pitch. A very, very good one. The future of finance he describes sounds less like a democratized, efficient utopia and more like a system with new, shinier tollbooths operated by a new set of gatekeepers. Same game, different players.