Frequently Asked Questions

Where will the new Center for Future Banking be located?

It will be based at the Media Lab, on the MIT campus.

What are the Center's goals?

The Center was established to provide a multidisciplinary research environment that encourages exploration of high-risk, high-payoff concepts in banking, with an emphasis on understanding and anticipating the role of emerging technologies in transforming the banking industry. This includes exploring the role of mobile devices, the rise of social networking, new ways to sense and model human behavior, and understanding the best ways to ensure consumer convenience while providing security and privacy.

Bank of America has made a major investment in this Center. What are the bank's expectations?

The expectation is that the Media Lab will serve as an "idea generator," experimenting with far-reaching concepts at the cutting edge of today's technologies. Lab researchers will collaborate with the bank to determine the potential impact—and customer benefits—of implementing these ideas.

Why did Bank of America choose the rather "unconventional" Media Lab for this initiative?

Because the Media Lab comes to this challenge with more than 20 years of experience in applying its unorthodox research approach to forecasting the impact of technology on everyday life, in developing tools to improve human capabilities, and in working closely with corporate sponsors.

The Lab's culture is one of developing fundamentally new technologies that are shaped by human concerns—of predicting and addressing the needs of a society in the midst of change. It offers researchers from engineering, science, the arts, and business the opportunity to join together to think about what the world could be like in 10 or 20 years, and to build working systems that will facilitate the changes envisioned. It offers a culture of learning by doing.

Does this Center represent a new sponsorship model for the Media Lab, and could this model scale to collaborations with other industries?

Yes. This is a new model for the Media Lab—one that identifies topics at the intersection of Lab expertise and the banking sector's concerns. Through corporate support, the Lab will promote and deepen its research in these areas.

This is a model that could easily apply to a range of businesses, offering a unique research setting to explore ideas that would simply be too risky to be done in a corporate environment. This explains why the Lab's sponsors range from consumer electronics manufacturers, to health care, to telecommunications. The Lab believes that there are a number of additional sectors that would mesh well with this model.