# Bülent Tekmen > Bülent Tekmen — co-founder of Colendi. Essays, a curated bookshelf, a reading map, and a lexicon of concepts on financial infrastructure, money, institutions at scale, and the long arc of technology. Bülent Tekmen is a co-founder of Colendi. He works on financial infrastructure and writes about money, institutions at scale, agentic finance, and the long arc of technology. This is his personal site — essays, a curated bookshelf, a reading map, a lexicon of concepts, and a public "operating stack" of links. ## Pages - [About](https://tekmen.ai/about): Who Bülent Tekmen is and what he works on. - [Now](https://tekmen.ai/now): What he is building and focused on right now. - [Banking.io](https://tekmen.ai/banking-io): The book he is writing on the architecture of money. ## Essays - [AI Is Bigger Than Five: The Founding Story of the AI Empires](https://tekmen.ai/writings/the-world-is-bigger-than-five): Fourteen chapters on the founding stories, internal coups, ideological schisms, and global power struggles of the AI age — from Dartmouth 1956 to the G7 table at Évian, 2026. - [The End of Lazy Money](https://tekmen.ai/writings/the-end-of-lazy-money): What happens when the machines start spending it — an essay on the rise of AI financial agents, from Klarna's very public walk-back to the cryptographic plumbing of a payments system built for non-humans. - [Electrons and Photons: The 1927 Solvay Conference and the Compounding of Ideas](https://tekmen.ai/writings/electrons-and-photons): Twenty-nine people sat for a portrait in Brussels in October 1927. There are no machines in the frame, yet a surprising amount of modern technology — the transistor, the laser, the chips that run today's AI — leads back, by one braided route or another, to the physics they were arguing about. An essay on concentrated intelligence, productive disagreement, and how ideas compound — and on how easily the story gets told too neatly. - [Trust Architecture in the Digital Age](https://tekmen.ai/writings/trust-architecture): After 2008, trust in financial institutions didn't vanish — it migrated from institutions to systems, protocols, and transparency, creating a new architecture that agentic banking must build on. - [Still Day One](https://tekmen.ai/writings/still-day-one): ColendiBank has accepted its first customers. On the zero-to-one journey—nearly three years from the first application to the first account—and why the work is only beginning. - [Money as Code — Why Programmable Money Changes Everything](https://tekmen.ai/writings/money-as-code): For five thousand years money has been a noun; programmable money makes it a verb — an active system that perceives conditions and creates outcomes, transforming the entire architecture of banking. - [The Death of Traditional Banking](https://tekmen.ai/writings/death-of-traditional-banking): How the smartphone, data ubiquity, and the 2008 trust collapse dissolved banking's three structural pillars — and what programmable infrastructure replaces them. - [Permission to Build a Bank](https://tekmen.ai/writings/permission-to-build-a-bank): The BDDK has approved the establishment of ColendiBank, a digital deposit bank. What it means to go from scoring the unbanked to holding a banking license of our own. - [Acquiring SETL, and a Pilot at the New York Fed](https://tekmen.ai/writings/acquiring-setl-and-the-new-york-fed-pilot): Why an embedded-finance company bought a wholesale settlement infrastructure firm—and what SETL is now building inside the New York Fed's Regulated Liability Network pilot. - [Fintech Will Eventually Eat the Banks: Every Company Will Become a FinTech Company](https://tekmen.ai/writings/fintech-will-eat-the-banks): Why every company is becoming a fintech company — how 'infrastructure as a service' is unbundling the bank, and where Colendi fits. - [The World Bank Features Colendi's Approach to Credit Scoring](https://tekmen.ai/writings/world-bank-features-colendi-credit-scoring): What the World Bank's credit-scoring guidelines reveal about alternative data, privacy, and financial inclusion—and why Colendi was built for this problem. - [Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Fintech 3.0 and Its Impact on the Banking Sector](https://tekmen.ai/writings/fintech-3-0-and-the-banking-sector): How fintech is reshaping mobile, online, and retail banking — blockchain for remittances, identity, and credit, and the rise of the partner-bank model. - [Building New Generation Digital Banks with Programmable Money and Trust](https://tekmen.ai/writings/digital-banks-programmable-money-and-trust): China's payment giants, Hong Kong's first digital-banking licenses, and how blockchain's promise of trust challenges both banks and BigTech. - [Introducing the Colendi Protocol: Our Technical Paper](https://tekmen.ai/writings/introducing-colendi-protocol-technical-paper): Why we designed the Colendi Protocol around decentralized identity, private data, secure computation, and a global financial passport. - [Hello World! Hello Colendi!](https://tekmen.ai/writings/hello-world-hello-colendi): The founding announcement of Colendi — a blockchain-based, decentralized credibility and microcredit platform giving the unbanked a global financial passport. ## Collections - [Bookshelf](https://tekmen.ai/bookshelf): Curated books with notes, across seven stacks — Artificial Intelligence; Biography & Exceptional Operators; Progress, Infrastructure & Operating Systems; Technological Sovereignty & Institutional Power; Manhattan Project & the Atomic Age; Philosophy & Reality Modeling; and History, Civilization & Technology. - [Reading](https://tekmen.ai/reading): A curated reading map of about 100 essays and articles in five shelves, from "Start Here" to deeper themes. - [Concepts](https://tekmen.ai/concepts): A personal lexicon of recurring ideas and mental models, defined in his own words. - [Links](https://tekmen.ai/links): A public operating stack — the people, labs, data sources, tools, and archives he keeps close. ## Feeds - [RSS](https://tekmen.ai/rss.xml): New essays.