Senior leaders at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Bank of England (BoE) warned that AI‑enabled cyberattacks are rapidly becoming a systemic threat to global financial stability, urging banks to strengthen defenses before trust in the financial system is undermined.
Speaking at an IMF/World Bank event in Bangkok, BoE governor Andrew Bailey referenced recent incidents involving autonomous AI agents hacking personal devices and the cyberattack that overheated refrigeration systems across French supermarkets. Bailey said the core issue is “trust in technology and human control,” noting that cyberattacks targeting financial infrastructure could erode public confidence. “If we don’t have trust in money, we don’t operate as a society,” he said.
IMF managing director Kristalina Georgieva echoed the concerns, drawing on her experience growing up “on the other side of the iron curtain,” where distrust in institutions led people to store cash at home. She warned that rising fraud, driven by AI‑powered attacks, could push modern consumers toward similar behavior. “Unless we figure out how to get ahead of this curve… we may end up with lots of people with shoeboxes under their beds,” Georgieva said.
The warnings coincide with the IMF’s latest Global Financial Stability Report, which states that cyber threats now constitute a systemic risk as financial services become more digitally interconnected. The report cautions that “a major attack affecting payments, trading or access to deposits could cause immediate losses and undermine confidence.”
According to the IMF, three factors are accelerating the risk: growing dependence on interconnected technologies, increasing reliance on a small number of critical technology providers, and the rising sophistication of cyber threats. The report notes that state‑sponsored actors, ransomware groups, and insiders now have access to powerful tools, including frontier AI models capable of advanced network‑attack simulations.
Both Bailey and Georgieva stressed that banks must act quickly to strengthen cyber resilience, warning that the speed and scale of AI‑driven attacks could outpace traditional defenses and threaten the stability of the global financial system.
