Bank of England and IMF chiefs warn cyber threat risks eroding trust in finance
Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey and IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva warned at IMF-World Bank meetings in Bangkok that cyber fraud and attacks could erode trust in finance and push people out of the formal system. They launched the Bangkok blueprint.
Bailey pointed to alarming headlines about self-replicating AI agents hijacking personal devices and the French supermarket hack that heated fridges to 50C. He said the heart of the debate about AI was “trust in technology” and “human control to achieve that trust in technology.” Technology is central to today’s financial system, he added, and “if we don’t have trust in money, we don’t operate as a society.”
Georgieva said the toll of cyber fraud was now so great that people could decide to opt out of the formal financial system altogether. “I was born and grew up on the other side of the iron curtain,” the Bulgarian economist said. “We didn’t trust the system. What did we do? I would have my dollars in a shoebox under my bed.” She added: “And I worry, today, that unless we figure out how to get ahead of this curve, given the speed, the scale and the cost of fraud growing up, we may end up with lots of people with shoeboxes under their beds.”
Georgieva said the threat was particularly acute for people on the fringes of the financial system. “Imagine what would happen if trust disappears or is eroded to a point that people no more have the courage to be included,” she said.
Her comments followed an IMF warning on Tuesday that the possibility of a big cyberattack was one of the factors raising the global financial stability threat level to “elevated,” alongside higher borrowing costs and the risk of an AI share price crash.
Bailey stressed that fraud was now frequently committed via social media platforms and apps, not just traditional financial channels, and urged big tech to take responsibility. He contrasted today’s environment with the legal status in the UK of outlets such as newspapers, which are responsible for the veracity of everything they publish. The governor said: “We’ve moved into quite an extreme position of, well, these platforms are open to everybody and there’s no real liability to the provision of the platform to what’s on it. Guess what? Everything’s on it. You know, the good, the bad and the incredibly ugly and downright criminal and terrible.”
He added: “I don’t go around pointing the finger at people and saying: ‘You’re bad.’ What I have said is: ‘Look, there is responsibility all around.’ And we need to evolve to a world where everybody understands this responsibility, and everybody is then a part of addressing the problem.” Bailey said: “We must get the social media companies involved because a lot of this fraud is transmitted through those channels.”
Bailey called for the same tools used by cybercriminals to be put to work protecting the financial system. “I’m going to use a sporting metaphor: this technology is arming the offence but it can also arm the defence, and it must do,” he said.
The panel event at which the pair spoke was to launch a new set of international principles for avoiding cyber fraud in financial institutions, called the Bangkok blueprint.