The advent of ambient banking is a watershed moment for the banking industry. It describes the incorporation of financial services into the offerings of companies that are not, primarily, financial services providers. Until now, a customer who bought a car might have obtained a loan from a bank in a transaction that was linked to but distinct from the purchase of the car. With ambient banking, the financial aspects are a seamless, frictionless part of the primary transaction and the bank is usually invisible to the customer. The significance is that by conceding ownership of the customer relationship, banks also allow revenue and market share to shift out of the banking industry to large, strongly branded players – most of them bigtech platforms – in a variety of other industries.