How will AI agents, synthetic media, and tokenised infrastructure reshape the risks banking supervisors are mandated to oversee?
The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has published its first Technology Horizon Scan, exploring how emerging technologies could reshape financial services for consumers, firms, and markets. The report is not a set of predictions or regulatory guidance, but sets out plausible ways emerging technologies could combine to create new outcomes — along with early signals of the risks they may enable.
Three converging trends stand out. Personalised intelligence: AI agents could increasingly act on consumers’ behalf — managing budgets, comparing products, and negotiating directly with firms’ systems — raising questions about autonomy, digital exclusion, and how conduct and consumer-protection frameworks apply to algorithm-driven decisions. Synthetic crime: as synthetic media becomes harder to distinguish from real content, AI may manipulate not only what we see and hear but our capacity to discern fact from fiction, expanding the attack surface for fraud, identity theft, and market manipulation. Programmable finance: tokenisation, central bank digital currencies, stablecoins, and smart contracts are moving from pilots to national strategies, reshaping financial infrastructure and raising new questions around interoperability, cross-border enforcement, and systemic risk.
The report stresses that as these technologies combine, they are reshaping the financial ecosystem and its participants — creating new opportunities and risks that warrant early dialogue between regulators, firms, and the broader financial ecosystem.
