caveat: don’t treat any article about the future seriously. At 4am…for want of anything better to do…this trip into the future.

It is always difficult to predict. Especially if it is about the future.

However certain things are clear. 2050 the ‘old people’ will be what we call millennial of today. The country will be run by people born in 2000 or later. A few very old people born in the previous generation will still be holding some positions of power.

We would have achieved a full fledged Financial one-stop shop. No. It will not be a bank as we see it now, it will be an app. More and more jobs will be more like ‘consultants’ and life time employment will look like a relic. More people will work from remote locations, and very little cooking will happen at home. Food will come from microwaves and refrigerator and less from the pan. There will be preventive health care, and the premium for insurance will be very high for those who don’t take care of their health.

You will have a chip installed in you for transmitting all your data – health, money, food,…to a government authority but hopefully there will be firewalls. A few people would be aged beyond 120 years in India, and there will be some villages of Japan and Spain where the average age would still be about 100 years, but a few people would be living at the age of 150 years. You could be renting a house at 88 and laughing about your grandmother who was FORCED to buy a house.

There will be many modes of transport – and more travel will be leisure.

In the wealth management space the advisers, fund managers, insurance providers, brokers will all plug play. You will be free to take advice from one adviser, run it past another adviser and execute with the help of a bank or a broker. There will be more transparency, but will be far more involved. You will be allowed to plan with a planner, insure with a real big insurer, invest in mutual fund, etf or direct shares. The number of listed companies will shrink and there will be an equity market just for institutional investors. There will be many clubs which will help you create your own portfolios and compete with fund managers. Your portfolio will be visible to all – and you could be compensated for people to see and copy.

Need for cash would have disappeared – the chip installed in your body will serve as your credit card/ debit card/ aadhar card/ pan card. All devices will be able to read this. All investment advisers will go through a 6 month course on using technology – and the whole populace will be comfortable with technology.

Go, get a life.