World Economic Forum: How Financial Services Lag on Cyber

The financial services sector is lagging behind in the use of AI to mitigate cyber security risks, according to the World Economic Forum’s Global Cybersecurity Outlook 2026.

Financial services companies are failing to become a leader in any of the five key use cases, WEF finds.

The results are based on extensive interviews with global business leaders, with the results revealed ahead of WEF’s Annual Meeting in Davos, where the world’s business, government and academic leaders are meeting.

Only just over half of financial services companies believe they have implemented any AI tools to automate their cyber security operations, behind the manufacturing, supply chain and transportation sector, and behind the energy sector. 

Automating security operations is critical to mitigate cyber risk due to the number of security events hitting financial services organisations each day. 

Financial services companies are, as a whole, failing to lead on the other four use cases identified by WEF:

• Detecting and responding to intrusions or anomalies
• Improving phishing and email threat detection
• Improving user behaviour analytics and insider threats
• Threat intelligence and risk prioritisation.

At the same time, threat actors are using AI to make their attacks more complex and difficult to defend against.

Categorising supply chain risk

WEF also identifies the top supply chain risks that are affecting the financial services sector, with lack of visibility being the sector’s top concern. 

A lack of visibility is concerning because it limits the effectiveness of financial services organisations to identify and mitigate risk. 

The second top supply chain risk is concentration risk – the fact that financial services companies carry too much dependence on a small number of suppliers.

Both themes carry significant risk for other sectors.

Understanding future cyber risks

Decentralised finance is one of the areas WEF has earmarked as carrying cybersecurity risk in the future.

It also highlights the future risk of synthetic identities – known commonly as deepfakes – and AI-driven fraud in a deep-dive into the cybersecurity risks of digital currencies.

“By 2030, digital currencies are expected to play a growing role in daily economic activity, with broader adoption across retail payments, payroll systems and selected public and cross-border services,” WEF says in the Global Cybersecurity Outlook 2026 report.

“Cyberattacks targeting exchanges, wallets and smart-contract infrastructure have already caused multi-billion dollar losses, and by 2030 such incidents could have systemic consequences, triggering potential liquidity shocks or eroding confidence in national and corporate digital assets.

“As synthetic identities and AI-driven fraud evolve, real-time verification and resilience of settlement networks will define trust in the financial system. 

“Interdependencies among decentralised finance, central-bank digital currencies and autonomous payment agents mean that disruption in one layer can quickly ripple through others.

“In this environment, digital currencies have become critical infrastructure whose security underpins economic and societal stability.”

WEF also highlights risks to financial transactions from disruption to land and satellite-based networks, which could comprise malicious and non-malicious disruption. 

The research was carried out among 804 leaders including 316 Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs), 105 CEOs and 123 other C-level executives including Chief Risk Officers and Chief Technology Officers, ensuring a high quality of response from Board-level roles.

Ninety-two countries were represented in the research.

In a Q&A session linked to the Annual Meeting, Barclays Investment Bank’s Head of Economics Research Christian Keller seeks to outline the potential of AI to organisations, arguing that AI growth will enable tech to keep giving to the global economy.

He says that although an AI bubble may form, it would be a “good bubble” and noted that investor confidence in AI remains high.