2040 — a fintech novel. And a portable method for reading your own industry.

Munich, 2040. One variable changed – money – everything else held constant. Money has become a behavioural sensor: it scores you, corrects your past, decides what you can buy.

That is the surface. Below it: a method. Look at the small, convenient concessions being introduced in your sector – fintech, law, medicine, marketing – and ask what they become in fifteen years. The novel gives you the lens.

Sixteen chapters. Eight free on Substack. This campaign funds 9–16 and the finished book. €5,000, thirty days, delivered August 2026.

Table of content: 

• Read Chapter One;
• Three signals from 2026;
• What happens in the story;
• What readers have said;
• What the campaign funds;
• The publisher;
• Who this book is for;
• Why now.

What this book actually is

Most readers first meet 2040 as a fintech thriller — a cinematic dystopia showing where current trends lead. That reading is correct. It is also the surface.

Below the surface, the book teaches one specific skill: to see separate signals from the present as parts of one connected picture. Cut the noise. Build the picture. The cinematic format is not a storytelling choice. It is a method.

The novel changes exactly one variable in the world we live in — money — and holds everything else constant. Same streets, same buildings, same people, same daily routines. Only the money is different. It has become a tool that tracks behaviour. Watching what changes when a single variable moves is how models teach the reader to see. Each chapter is a case study in separating signal from noise.

Backers of this campaign are the first readers applying the method before the book that describes it is finished.

The method is not specific to fintech

The 2040 lens adapts to any industry. Architect, doctor, software engineer, lawyer, consultant, marketer — the method applies. Look at the small, convenient concessions and bureaucratic rules being introduced in your sector right now. Ask what they become in ten or fifteen years, taken to their natural end point. The novel gives you the method. The rest of the picture is yours to draw.

Three signals from 2026

The book's realism does not rely on imagination. It rests on real documented changes, each dated, each in the public record. Three examples.

Signal 1. A unified graph of client data.

In April 2026 the EU Council agreed the final text of the Payment Services Regulation. It establishes the legal ground for banks to share fraud-related behavioural data across providers. Before PSR, each bank held its data separately. After PSR, elements of your payment behaviour become part of a shared data system that the entire banking system can read.

In the novel, this layer grows into the Payment Integrity Graph — a system that connects every transaction with geolocation, sector risk profiles, and contact history. It was not invented. It grew from PSR.

Signal 2. Two classes of customers in one country.

On 28 April 2026 the UK introduced protections against sudden bank account closure — ninety days' notice, written reasons. But only for accounts opened after that date. Everyone with an older account stayed under the old regime, under which 453,230 accounts were closed in 2025, most without detailed explanation.

In the novel, the principle expands. Your rating and the date of your consent determine whether you can buy a train ticket. Your rights depend not on who you are, but on when you signed the contract.

Signal 3. Money with a built-in power to block payments.

On 8 April 2026 the US Treasury proposed requiring digital money issuers to embed into their code the ability to block, freeze, and reject transactions on a regulator's signal. That same month, Tether froze more than $344 million in USDT across two addresses in coordination with OFAC and US law enforcement.

In the novel, this architecture makes changing a transaction after it happened possible: an algorithm recalculates a past purchase because money can now follow programmed rules. Money that can be programmed to block can be programmed to do anything.

Read separately, these look like normal-looking rule changes. Read together, they look like a blueprint. The gap between 2026 and 2040 is not a technological leap. It is a series of small compromises.

What happens in the story

Munich, 2040. Max de Vries, a former head of security at Deutsche Bank, walks the sealed exclusion zone north of the city, DFT-21, recovering traces of the world before PSD5. On one such run he retrieves a hard drive left by Anna Kravchenko, a journalist who vanished in 2027. The drive contains evidence of how the control architecture was designed, and by whom.

Jamie Müller, a Financial Monitoring Agency analyst with a rating of 847, sees his missing father's name on Anna's drive. He writes back to Max: I'm in.

Mia van Doren, a Spiegel correspondent, watches her colleague get arrested at Davos for asking a single question the system did not allow. She reaches Sophie Clark, an operator inside the underground hidden financial network that serves the eight million Europeans the system has decided are inconvenient.

All four converge on a bar beneath the Asam Church, one of the last blind spots in Munich, and begin to assemble something the architecture was not built to survive.

Two architectures

The book divides into two halves.

Chapters 1–8 — the architecture of control. Published. The Payment Integrity Graph, changing transactions after they happened, the Liberty Blackout, and the three human shortcuts the system was designed to weaponise: trust in authority, following the majority, fear of loss. This is the warning layer — how a world like this is built without anyone ordering it directly.

Chapters 9–16 — the architecture of choice. After the crowdfunding. How people build communities that operate inside such a system, read its rules, and expand the space for decisions. This is the solution layer. It is the half of the book early readers keep asking about.

Subculture-type communities

Most corporate communities run on reward-based loyalty — conditional loyalty exchanged for cashback, team events, free coffee. These structures collapse at the first serious pressure. A competitor offers three per cent more; loyalty evaporates.

The characters in 2040 build differently. Strangers become a community without one central point that keeps working even when one part fails. It includes people like Sophie Clark, who know the system's architecture from the inside and use its own logic against it. These structures cannot be bought with bonuses. Commitment inside them is built through shared reading of the same signals, not through rewards.

The full edition of the book includes an appendix of applied materials on building subculture-type communities. Not a motivational guide. A practical playbook — the architectural principles the second half of the book puts into narrative form.

A community that holds under pressure starts with people who see the same thing when they look at the world. Not people who think alike. People who know how to read the same signals.

What readers have said

The reviewers below are the first professional readers of the eight published chapters. They read the book before the campaign was announced and without commercial arrangement.

"There is no need for tanks or revolutions, simply comfort, convenience and a silent majority which is not interested in asking difficult questions. The account is clear, well-written and intellectually challenging."  

— David Whitehouse, PhD, ex-Bloomberg editor, «The Dark Side of Development» Substack.

"By the time you are reading Chapter 6, you realise you have been boiled alive. The frog metaphor is not a throwaway line. It is the thesis of the entire book."

— Anna Levitt, founder of bubblebossco.com, «How to Boss AI» Substack

"A surgically precise masterclass in speculative fintech horror. If you value your privacy, your autonomy, or your past, read this book before the system decides you should not."

— Farida Khalaf, organizational-systems writer, «Lights On» Substack

"The technical architecture of the story reads less like worldbuilding and more like a leaked briefing document from a system already in the works in some lab."

— Joel Salinas, AI strategy coach, «Leadership in Change» Substack

The forewords

The book opens with two forewords.

David R. Whitehouse, PhD, former Bloomberg editor and author of The Dark Side of Development, frames 2040 as journalism about the near future rather than speculation. His opening piece is adapted from his review Ever-decreasing dystopias.

Dr Oleg Maltsev closes the opening with an essay applying to 2040 the analytical framework of his book Dancing with Time. Volume I. The Origin. Maltsev reads the novel through the architecture of controlled environments: how people inside constrained systems learn to read the rules faster than the institutions that built them.

Together, the two forewords position 2040 between investigation and method: not only a story about financial infrastructure, but a way of reading how controlled environments are made — and how people learn to move inside them.

What the campaign funds

Funds raised through this campaign are allocated across four categories.

Chapters 9–16. Completion of the second half of the manuscript, currently in draft.

Editorial. Full editorial pass across all sixteen chapters, including fact-checking of every regulatory reference against primary EU sources.

Cover, typography and production. Final visual identity and layout for the book.

Distribution. Delivery to backers in DRM-free digital formats and preparation for retail release on Amazon in September 2026.

The four items above are the practical work. The claim behind them is simpler: this campaign completes a diagnostic tool that a small number of professional readers have already begun applying to their own sectors.

If the campaign clears its base target, additional stretch outcomes will be announced against defined thresholds. Details are held until the thresholds are crossed, not before.

Optional add-on — Collector's Hardback

A collector's hardback edition through Bookvault will be offered separately to tier 2 and above backers after the campaign closes, at €45 plus EU shipping, produced in a single print run once minimum orders are met. This is not a Crowdfundr reward tier; details go directly to backers at eligible tiers by email after the campaign.

The author

Mila Agius is a behavioural psychologist working in the Gigerenzer school on decision-making under uncertainty. Her published work applies fast-and-frugal heuristics to senior hiring, fintech product design, and regulatory analysis. She has worked with fintech teams and regulators on the same protocols the novel builds from.

The eight published chapters were written in the same period Mila was reviewing regulatory drafts of the type the novel extrapolates from.

She writes under a pseudonym. The face is not disclosed; the position is. The novel is an artefact of that position, made readable.

Her Substack, Heuristics vs Traps, publishes analytical essays on how decisions are shaped alongside the novel's chapters.

The publisher

The campaign is organised by Applied Knowledge Group S.R.L., a Romanian company based in Iași, directed by Daryna Karuna. AKG carries the legal, financial and practical setup of the project: contracts, tax compliance, backer relations, printing, distribution and delivery. Backers transact with AKG.

Daryna Karuna is Media Coordinator at the European Academy of Sciences in Ukraine (EUASU). She has twelve years of field research across forty countries with the Expedition Corps under Dr Oleg Maltsev. On Substack she writes The Leverage Point, on psychometrics and decision risk in senior hiring, and Expedition Files, on how institutions actually work. She is the authorised representative of the book for partnership, media, and collaboration enquiries. She is also the authorised representative of the book for partnership, media, and collaboration enquiries.

Who this book is for

Anyone whose profession includes reading regulatory signals for a living — fintech operators, compliance professionals, EU policy observers, journalists covering financial infrastructure.

And anyone in any other field — architect, doctor, engineer, lawyer, consultant, marketer — who can apply the same lens to their own sector. The same pattern appears wherever convenience, safety or efficiency become reasons for changing the rules. Fintech is simply where it is easiest to see first.

Readers who back the campaign form the first named cohort of that readership. Their names are recorded in the book from the €18 tier upward.

Why now

Every core mechanism in the book has a recognisable prototype in 2026. Three of them are documented above. There are more: the ECB digital euro pilot with a programmability layer in the specification; past transaction changes legalised in narrow contexts across the EU; declining cash acceptance well ahead of any legal requirement; account closures and risk-based exclusion without stated cause documented across the EU and UK.

The point is not to predict 2040. It is to recognise 2026 before it becomes ordinary.

The first chapter is free. It is one click away.

Read one chapter. Test the model against the world you already know. If it holds, help finish the book. If it does not, close the tab. Either way, the eight published chapters remain free.

Chapter one: DFT 21. The Zone

Project site: the2040model.com

Author's Substack: Mila Agius 

Cut the noise. Build the picture.