Every time I grab my bag and walk across the gangway onto a plane, I wonder just how much longer we are going to be able to get away with this. Riding these massive metal leviathans spewing out environment destroying toxins like some kind of medieval dragon. And if that sounds strange, don't forget that doctors once recommended cigarettes too.

We have become addicted to an idea of globalism. But what that really means, is that at some point travel stopped becoming a luxury and started becoming public transport. We catch planes now the way that people catch the bus. Somewhere along the line, we conditioned ourselves to to the idea that a holiday is not just a break from work, it is a removal from the familiar. Except really, there is almost nowhere left like that. The more we spread ourselves across the planet, the less the planet is less different to anywhere else. And yet because I still travel in search of elsewhere, I have in mind that I should buy carbon offset credits every time I do. The idea that somewhere a tree is being is planted might lessen one's moral checked luggage - but I'm under no delusions. Carbon credits are no more than medieval 'indulgences' re-imagined for the 21st century.

Someone once told me that the heaviest thing on a plane is actually its paint. I don't know about that. I suspect that these days there are a few heavy hearts too.

There is an old man who works at the end of my street in Hong Kong. Every day he sews clothes, repairs handbags, and stitches threads. He never looks up. When I walk past him I think of those sped up movies they play on TV of a plant growing, as the sun and stars move around in a blur. Except in my tailor's case, it would glittering skyscrapers growing, collapsing and rising again at high speed around him as he worked. I wish I could be there to take a picture of his expression at the moment he finally looked up.

1. Mobile Will Become The Primary Transaction Channel
Mobile banking has been talked about for a while, but things are finally speeding up. Interestingly, the catalyst for innovation is not smart phones but dumb ones. In the same way that creating a $100 laptop for the Third World, led to the development of the netbook for everyone else – mobile banking is taking off fastest in developing countries like Kenya and South Africa. For example, Absa Bank in South Africa have now reached a million mobile banking accounts, close to a quarter of their customers base and more than twice the number of their customers accessing from the web.

From Indian workers using SMS to send money back to relatives to Japanese consumers using contactless Felica chips in their phones to pay for just about anything – mobiles will increasingly become both a primary originator of transactions and, with integrated biometrics, an important link in the identity authentication chain.

2. Personal Finance Management Moves to the Cloud
Quicken might have been the state of the art in personal finance in the nineties, but these days, money management tools are moving rapidly online. - or as they are calling these days - ‘the Cloud’. Cloud based upstarts like Mint.com and Wesabe not only offer consumers the ability to track their expenditures, they also draw on their networked data sets to offer intelligent suggestions for saving money, comparing financial products and even alerting users to credit card scams.

Mint.com, for example, has quadrupled their registered users since the financial crisis hit in September. With over 900,000 members, close to 1% of US households, they are able to use their sample data to let you know whether you spend more or less on coffee than the average user, or whether your average purchase price and purchase frequency at Amazon.com, Starbucks, and JetBlue is radically different from someone else with your earning profile. Data is a powerful incentive to share information, particularly for younger demographics. More importantly, these tools are exactly the kinds of features that will need to be rapidly replicated or integrated in the online channels of more traditional financial product companies.

3. Physical Outlets Will Become More Important
Given the growth of online and mobile channels, investing in branch networks may seem counterintuitive. But curiously, as branches become less important for transactions, they will become more important as branding and consumer engagement channels.

In retail circles, the Apple store has become a cliché for design innovation but the Finance sector is catching on. ING Direct were early pioneers with their café branch concept, while more recently Barclays have piloted Microsoft Surface technology in their redesigned UK flagship. Barclay’s Surface program allows customers to manipulate digital content with their hands and access information about banking products with simple gestures.

4. Social Lending Moves Mainstream
If one thing is certain over the next few years – it will become harder for many people to obtain access to personal loans. Interestingly enough, that is exactly the kind of environment under which social or P2P lending players like Zopa, Prosper and Kiva may begin to flourish. Social lending sites work like an online money exchange, allowing people who have money to lend to offer it to those who wish to borrow.

Although micro-credit really began as an innovation to help entrepreneurs in the poor countries to access funding, there is a broader niche in the rest of the world for consumers who might have never used a pawn shop, but still want to access alternative sources of cash finance.

5. Credits Ratings Go The Way of Ebay
For something that is so essential to calculation of consumer risk profiles – it is astonishing how arcane and inefficient the system of credit ratings is. In the US for example, you can arrive in town with a million dollars in the bank and still struggle to get a mobile phone on contract because you have no prior credit history. For inspiration, financial institutions would do well to observe how reputation is recorded and shared online.

From consumers trading with each other on eBay to more subtle attention filters like Slashdot or Twitter – the Web has come up with a variety of ways to manage and mitigate issues of trust. Repayment histories are not the sole determinant of future behaviour. Interestingly, as consumer financial products evolve other factors such as social capital may become more influential.

A recent MIT study of social lending on Prosper.com found that social features such group affiliations and endorsements significantly impacted the chance of a consumer getting funding for a loan request. Such social factors not only doubled the probability of getting a loan request fully funded, but made it possible for a borrower with a priori non-bankable profile to get a loan with reasonable rates.

None of these trends are a panacea for the current Credit Crisis, but in a way that is also the point. The problems facing the finance industry are more complex than the loss of liquidity.

There is a growing disconnect between retail consumers and financial institutions. In the same way the Web changed the dynamics of the music industry – the risk for major players is that others will innovate faster at the consumer level, leaving them the unglamorous role of backend factories of commoditised financial products.

This isn’t great news in a time of generally bad news. But then again, there is probably no better time to stop and re-imagine exactly what the future of finance might look like.

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1. Cloud
It’s ironic but even as the price of personal storage plummets, we find ourselves storing more and more of our content elsewhere. People have been talking about Cloud Computing forever, but suddenly it just happened. Almost everything we now create – documents, videos, photos, contacts and schedules – is easily kept online. The driver of this trend is not storage, but rather connectivity. Stuff is simply more useful when other people can see it - photos are more fun when people can comment on them, documents more relevant when co-workers can collaborate on them, and company data more insightful when it can be benchmarked against your peers. Like a webpage that no one links to, content on a hard drive sitting on your desk is a fraction as valuable as content floating in the Cloud.

2. Cheap
Personal tech is becoming cheap. And no, it’s not because of deflation. If you were watching the top 25 lists at Amazon at Christmas, you would notice that most of the items in the electronics category were Netbooks. Netbooks took everyone by surprise. Small, inexpensive and with great battery life – bare-bone computing bucks the trend that PCs should get more powerful with every generation. But here is the curious thing - in a way, we are still on the ski slopes of Moore’s Law. It’s just that now the entire Internet with its billions of servers, network nodes and storage farms, has become the world’s most powerful computer. Whether its communication, research or just fun - most of our daily computing activities can be executed using nothing more than a web browser and a wireless internet connection. Of course, the cheap trend will not just impact PCs. Across the board, consumers are trading quality and fidelity for convenience and social connectivity. CDs replaced by MP3, DVDs by online video, HD camcorders for cheap Flip video cameras, and now laptops for Netbooks. Expect more categories to follow.

3. Solid
Memory is going solid state. That means no more moving parts, no hard disk parking errors, greater speed and reliability. It started a decade ago as flash cards for cameras. Last year, the inconceivable happened - solid state memory turned up in hard drives for laptops. Soon it will be standard. There is a new architecture coming where our personal devices will be constantly connected to content and contacts via wireless broadband. In this scenario, local storage will work more like RAM - caching what we need locally and fast, rather than what we do now – bulky hard drives to keep copies of everything at hand.

4. Ubiquitous
That of course raises the question, what does it mean to be constantly connected? How we access the Web influences the ultimate nature of it. Consider the experience of the US as compared to Japan. In the US, most consumers accessed the Internet through fixed cable broadband while in Japan, the most popular gateway to Web content was through mobile devices. Not surprisingly, Web behaviour and content developed in very different ways in each country. In my view, the next wave of access innovation is ubiquity – a network that is continuously accessible and typically accessed without deliberate intervention by the user.pUbiquitouspaccess will have powerful implications for how the Web evolves. Your bedside radio will adjust its clock from the Web, your TV will download your favourite TV shows, your phone will update its address book from your social network, and the photo frame on your desk will display pictures that your daughter is taking on her holiday in real time. There is no magic to this. In fact, you may not even notice. In the same way you don’t need to understand phone technology to make a call, the Internet will gradually disappear from view.

5. Overlay
Here is the final, and in some ways most powerful trend – augmented reality. You might have noticed recent video games such as “Eye of Judgment” for Playstation, using toy cameras to project 3D animations over trading cards. That kind of technology is gradually appearing in phones. Already iPhone and Android based phones offer applications capable of cross referencing your GPS co-ordinates and pictures taken with your phone with product databases to give you reviews and local data. That’s only the beginning. Eventually with micro projectors or enhanced eyewear, the Web will become a persistent overlay onto the real world – providing us with content tailored to our physical contexts.

So that’s the fast five in five fast paragraphs. I could elaborate but in a way, they are all expressions of the same point which most of us knew ten years ago - the Web changes everything. Even the Web.