Or maybe a better title would be “A queue appeared in Kauniainen over night!”
I live in Kauniainen, a small town just outside Helsinki.
In the centre, there is a modest market square with a handful of seasonal stalls. Nothing particularly dramatic happens there. People buy vegetables, coffee, lunch and, during the short Finnish summer, ice cream.
For years, one of those stalls sold the familiar Finnish version of summer: Pingviini ice cream served from a traditional kiosk. The same brands, the same scoops, the same cones. It was dependable. It was recognisable. It had been there for as long as most people could remember.
Then another ice-cream kiosk opened almost next door.
It is called Jäätelöherkku. The family behind it opened the kiosk on 10 July 2026 because their children had grown tired of small scoops and dry cones. Instead of accepting the established format, they borrowed an idea from summers spent in Sweden. They bake their own waffle cones on the premises, make their own chocolate coating and serve unusually generous portions of Swedish cream ice cream.
It sounds like a small difference.
It was not.
Within two weeks, the kiosk had been featured by both Helsingin Sanomat and Hufvudstadsbladet. The Hufvudstadsbladet headline was wonderfully direct: “All of Kauniainen is queuing for his giant ice creams.” Iltalehti and Yle followed. By early August, the kiosk was serving several hundred customers a day. The owner was starting work before four in the morning, using around 45 kilos of waffle batter a day and baking cones for hours before opening. Queues sometimes formed before the shutters went up and stretched beyond an hour.
I walk past the square twice most days with our dog Toto.
The queue has become part of the landscape. Families stand talking. Children compare the size of their ice creams. People have driven in from neighbouring towns. The square feels busier and more alive than it did before.
Then I noticed something else.
The old kiosk was closed. Empty. Abandoned-looking. A traditional ice-cream stand sitting beside a crowd of people who had come to buy ice cream.
I do not know why it closed. It may have been a staffing problem, a commercial decision, a temporary closure or something entirely unrelated to the new arrival. It would be too convenient to claim that one kiosk directly killed the other without knowing the facts.
But as a picture of competitive disruption, it is difficult to ignore.
On one side of the square, there is a queue around the block.
On the other, there is an incumbent with no customers.
Banking executives should look carefully at that picture.
Customers did not suddenly discover ice cream
Jäätelöherkku did not invent ice cream.
It did not introduce a revolutionary new ingredient, build a global supply chain or deploy artificial intelligence to optimise frozen desserts.
It took something familiar and made the experience noticeably better.
The cone is freshly baked. The chocolate coating is made by the business. The portions are generous enough to become a talking point. The preparation is visible. The product looks good in photographs. Buying it feels like a small event rather than a routine transaction.
That combination matters more than the individual features.
An incumbent looking at the proposition might dismiss each component.
We could make larger scoops.
We could offer chocolate sauce.
We could buy better cones.
We could change the signage.
That misses the point. The attraction is not one feature. It is the coherence of the whole proposition.
The new kiosk has made a clear choice about the experience it wants to create. Everything supports that choice, from the product and preparation to the service, presentation and word-of-mouth effect.
The traditional kiosk was selling ice cream, a product, an output.
The new entrant was creating a reason to choose it, an experience, an outcome.
That distinction sits at the heart of what is happening in banking.
Most banks still define competition through products. They compare current accounts, savings rates, mortgages, cards and lending margins. They measure market share through balances and account numbers. They watch formal switching rates and take comfort when those rates remain low.
But customers rarely experience a bank as a collection of banking products.
They experience the speed of opening an account. The clarity of the app. Whether a payment arrives immediately. Whether they understand a charge. Whether they can freeze a card without calling anyone. Whether the bank remembers what they were trying to do yesterday. Whether it helps at the moment they need help.
The competitive unit is increasingly the experience around the product, not the product itself.
A current account is ice cream.
The question is what you wrap around it.
Low churn is not loyalty
This is where many incumbent banks misread their own position.
Customers often remain with the bank they have used for years. Salary payments still arrive there. The mortgage is there. Direct debits continue to run. Moving everything feels inconvenient, and in many markets the perceived benefit of a complete switch does not justify the work.
That can look like loyalty.
Much of it is inertia.
Accenture’s global banking study found that 73 per cent of customers use banks beyond their main provider, 58 per cent had bought a financial product from a new provider during the previous year and a third had a relationship with a digital bank. The same study described a growing problem created by undifferentiated digital experiences: customers keep the primary institution while quietly spreading their financial lives across several providers.
This is the banking equivalent of keeping the old ice-cream kiosk on the square while joining the queue next door.
The customer has not necessarily closed the incumbent account. From the bank’s perspective, the relationship still exists. The customer appears in the reporting. They may still be classified as active.
But the meaningful activity is moving elsewhere.
The customer uses one provider for everyday spending, another for travel, another for investing and another for savings. The incumbent retains the mortgage and salary account but loses the daily interactions. Over time, it loses behavioural data, payment activity, referrals and the first opportunity to meet the customer’s next need.
This is invisible attrition.
It is more dangerous than a clean account closure because it is easy to overlook. The bank can report stable customer numbers while becoming less important to those customers every year.
The old idea of the primary bank assumed a reasonably integrated relationship. The bank holding the salary account would usually hold the payments activity, savings, borrowing and much of the customer data.
That relationship is being disassembled.
Primacy is no longer a status awarded when an account is opened. It is something providers compete for in every interaction.
A customer may still call an incumbent their main bank because that is where their salary arrives. But if they open the other app several times a day, use its card, recommend it to friends and try its new products first, which institution really owns the relationship?
Banks need to stop confusing administrative primacy with behavioural primacy.
One tells you where the customer’s account is.
The other tells you where their attention has gone.
The new entrants are no longer small kiosks
For a long time, incumbent banks could dismiss neobanks as attractive interfaces sitting on top of incomplete business models.
There was some truth in that criticism.
Many digital banks began with narrow propositions. They concentrated on payments, foreign exchange or personal financial management. Some depended heavily on interchange, venture funding or favourable interest-rate conditions. They lacked meaningful lending businesses, deep deposit franchises and the operational maturity expected of established banks.
Some still do.
The European Central Bank has pointed out that digital banks remain a relatively small part of the euro-area banking system. Their asset share rose from 3.1 per cent in 2019 to 3.9 per cent in 2024, and many still operate narrow, concentrated business models. On average, they have also remained less profitable than traditional banks and are more dependent on price-sensitive retail deposits.
Incumbents should take that seriously.
They should not take comfort from it.
The strategic error is to evaluate new entrants only by what they are today, while ignoring the direction and speed of travel.
Revolut passed 70 million customers in early 2026, having added 20 million since November 2024. It reported $6 billion in 2025 revenue and $2.3 billion in profit before tax. Its Finnish website says that 222,000 people in Finland already use the service.
Monzo ended its 2026 financial year with 15.2 million customers, £25.7 billion in deposits and £1.7 billion in revenue. More importantly, 49 per cent of its monthly active users described Monzo as their primary bank. Seventy-nine per cent of new customers joined through word of mouth.
Those are not the numbers of experimental kiosks.
They are institutions developing the scale, deposits, product breadth and economics required to compete for the whole relationship.
The threat is also broader than neobanks. Wallet providers, investment platforms, accounting systems, commerce platforms and AI-driven services are all moving towards the customer’s financial moments. Some want to become banks. Others have no interest in carrying a banking licence. They simply want to control the interface, the context and the decision.
The regulated bank may remain underneath, manufacturing accounts, holding deposits, processing payments or providing credit.
It may even make money doing so.
But it will no longer own the queue.
The waffle cone is not a digital feature
There is a predictable response when banks see a competitor offering a better experience.
They copy the visible feature.
A neobank offers real-time spending notifications, so the incumbent adds notifications.
The competitor introduces virtual cards, so the incumbent adds virtual cards.
It provides budgeting tools, savings pots or subscription management, so similar functions appear in the incumbent app.
This is usually described as closing the feature gap.
The gap rarely closes.
By the time the feature has passed through prioritisation, funding, architecture, risk, compliance, procurement, development, testing and release management, the competitor has moved on. More importantly, the copied feature often arrives as an isolated function inside an experience that still reflects the old operating model.
It is the equivalent of the traditional ice-cream kiosk buying a bottle of chocolate sauce.
The sauce is not why the queue exists.
The new kiosk’s proposition begins with a customer frustration: small, expensive portions served in dry, generic cones. The response is designed around that frustration. Product, process and presentation reinforce one another.
Most incumbent bank propositions begin elsewhere.
They begin with the products already owned by business units, the systems already in place, the channels already funded and the governance boundaries already agreed. Customer research may influence the interface, but the institution remains organised around its own history.
This creates digital sameness.
The app may look cleaner. The buttons may move. The language may become friendlier. But the underlying proposition remains a digital rendering of the existing bank.
That is why so many bank apps are perfectly competent and completely forgettable.
The real lesson from the ice-cream stall is not that craftsmanship always beats scale. Nor is it that customers will queue indefinitely for novelty. The novelty will fade, competitors will imitate and operational pressure will test the business.
The lesson is that customer expectations can be reset very quickly.
Once people have tasted the freshly made cone, the dry one is no longer neutral. It is disappointing.
Once customers have opened an account in minutes, waiting several days feels unreasonable.
Once they have received immediate and understandable payment notifications, delayed and cryptic transaction descriptions feel broken.
Once they can manage a card, move money or start saving without navigating the bank’s internal structure, the traditional experience becomes harder to defend.
Competitors do not need to make the incumbent objectively worse.
They make it feel worse by changing the reference point.
Why incumbents struggle to respond
An ice-cream kiosk can change its proposition quickly. A bank cannot.
Banks carry regulated balance sheets, complex product estates, decades of customer history and an obligation to remain resilient while changing. They must protect deposits, prevent financial crime, meet capital requirements and operate critical national infrastructure. These constraints are real.
But complexity can become an excuse.
The most dangerous explanation in banking is: “We are different because we are a bank.”
Of course a bank is different from a fintech or an ice-cream kiosk. That does not mean customers will indefinitely accept a poorer experience. It means the bank must solve a harder design and execution problem.
The competitive asymmetry is uncomfortable.
The new entrant can begin with one sharp customer problem and build around it. The incumbent begins with thousands of products, processes, policies and dependencies that cannot simply be switched off.
The new entrant can choose a narrow target segment. The incumbent must serve young digital customers, wealthy clients, vulnerable customers, small businesses and people who still depend on branches and telephone support.
The new entrant can design a coherent platform. The incumbent often has to coordinate several generations of technology, duplicated customer records, product-specific servicing models and organisational units with competing priorities.
None of this makes transformation impossible.
It changes how transformation must be approached.
A bank cannot respond by launching a three-year “neobank experience programme” around a new front end while leaving the operating model untouched. Nor will a wholesale technology replacement automatically create a proposition customers prefer.
Technology replacement and transformation are related, but they are not the same thing.
Replacing a core platform may improve resilience, cost and speed of change. Those are important outcomes. But customers do not form an emotional attachment to a bank because it has moved its workloads to the cloud or implemented an event-driven architecture.
Progressive transformation starts with a business choice.
Which customers are we trying to serve better?
Which moments do we want to own?
What should be materially different about the experience?
Which capabilities must we build because they differentiate us?
Which should we buy because others can provide them better?
Which should we consume as services because ownership adds no advantage?
Only then can the bank make sensible decisions about platforms, cores, data, channels and partnerships.
Without those choices, modernisation becomes expensive motion. The bank builds a newer kiosk and continues selling the same dry cones.
The battle is for advocacy, not retention
The queue in Kauniainen contains another lesson.
People are not merely buying the product. They are talking about it.
They photograph it. They bring friends. They tell neighbours to try it. They are prepared to wait, sometimes in poor weather, because participation has become part of the value.
That is advocacy.
Banks tend to set a lower ambition. They talk about retention.
Retention asks whether the customer has left.
Advocacy asks whether the customer would bring someone else.
The distinction matters because an incumbent can retain a customer who has become entirely indifferent. A mortgage, salary account or bundle of direct debits may keep the relationship in place long after enthusiasm has disappeared.
Indifference is not stable.
It lasts until something gives the customer a reason to act.
The trigger may be a better savings rate, a travel need, a child’s first account, a poor service experience or a recommendation from a friend. The new provider does not have to persuade the customer to move everything. It only has to win one use case.
That first use case is the opening.
A travel card becomes the everyday card. The everyday card becomes a salary account. The salary account creates deposits. Deposits support lending. The provider that began at the edge moves steadily towards the centre.
This is why the argument that “customers still keep their traditional bank” is weaker than it sounds.
Of course they do.
The new entrant does not need the customer to close the old relationship on day one. It needs to become useful, then habitual, then trusted.
Customer relationships are rarely stolen in one dramatic act.
They leak.
One payment at a time.
One journey at a time.
One recommendation at a time.
By the time the incumbent sees the account closure, the relationship may have been gone for years.
The empty kiosk is a warning, not a prediction
Large banks will not disappear because a well-designed app opens beside them.
Banking has barriers that do not exist in a market square. Capital, regulation, liquidity, trust, credit capability and operational resilience matter. Incumbents have advantages that challengers would be foolish to underestimate.
The established banks also have time to respond.
But probably less than they think.
The empty kiosk should not be treated as a prediction that every traditional bank will fail. It is a warning about what happens when an incumbent mistakes familiarity for preference.
The traditional ice-cream stall had the location.
It had the recognised brand.
It had an established product and years of presence.
What it did not have was the queue.
Banks can hold licences, deposits, branches, product factories and millions of registered customers and still lose the thing that determines their future: the customer’s active preference.
That is the real threat from neobanks and other digital entrants.
They are not simply taking accounts.
They are teaching customers what banking could feel like.
And once expectations move, history provides less protection than incumbents imagine.
I will walk past the square again tomorrow. The new kiosk may have another long queue. The old one may reopen. Perhaps both will eventually find a place in the market.
But the picture I saw today will stay with me.
A square full of people buying ice cream.
A new entrant struggling to keep up with demand.
And an established kiosk next door, closed and empty.
The game is already on.
Join us for the Helsinki launch of Rip Out the Core: A DIY Guide to Platform-Enabled Banking Transformation:
When: Thursday 13 August 2026, 16:30 to 19:00 Where: Maria 01, Helsinki Hosted by Digital Banking Academy & Fintech Farm. Spaces are limited, so sign up early via this link.
