Our Technology Horizon Scan explores how emerging technologies could reshape financial services – and what that means for consumers, firms, and markets.
Summary
We want to understand technological change to anticipate its outcomes and gain early insight on what it may mean for financial services and for us as a regulator.
Key findings include:
- Personalised intelligence: Artificial intelligence (AI) tools are becoming more embedded in consumers' financial lives, which could change how people budget, save and make financial choices. This may empower people but also raises questions around autonomy, digital exclusion and harm.
- Synthetic crime: Synthetic media is becoming harder to tell apart from real content. AI may manipulate not only what we see and hear (for example, audio and video deepfakes) but also our capacity to discern fact from fiction. This could expose consumers and firms to new forms of fraud and deception.
- Programmable finance: the underlying ‘plumbing’ of the global financial system is changing, as protocol-based infrastructure moves from pilots to national strategies – including tokenisation, smart contracts, and shared ledgers.
As emerging technologies combine, they are changing the financial ecosystem and its participants, creating new opportunities and risks.