Artificial intelligence and cybercrime are becoming a test of whether people will continue to trust the financial system, according to warnings from the heads of the Bank of England and the International Monetary Fund. The Guardian reported that Andrew Bailey and Kristalina Georgieva raised the issue during a panel on online fraud at the IMF and World Bank annual meetings in Bangkok.

Bailey, the Bank of England governor, pointed to reports about self-replicating AI agents taking over personal devices and a separate cyberattack that drove supermarket refrigerators to extreme temperatures. He framed the problem as one of maintaining human control over technology. Because modern finance depends heavily on digital systems, he argued, confidence in those systems is inseparable from confidence in money itself.

A fading path connects a secure financial doorway to cash kept in a shoebox.
IMF leadership warned that worsening fraud could push vulnerable people away from formal finance.

Georgieva warned that the speed, scale and cost of cyber-fraud could persuade some people to leave formal finance altogether. Drawing on her childhood in communist-era Bulgaria, she recalled how distrust encouraged people to keep foreign currency outside the banking system. She said the present threat may be especially serious for people already at the margins of financial inclusion.

The warning followed the IMF’s decision a day earlier to describe the overall threat to global financial stability as elevated. The possibility of a major cyberattack was one of the factors behind that assessment, alongside higher government borrowing costs and the danger of a sharp correction in AI-related share prices. The Guardian’s report did not assign a probability to a cyber event or isolate how much of the fraud problem is directly caused by AI.

Defensive AI filters block fraudulent signals before they reach a financial gateway.
The Bangkok panel called for technology to strengthen cyber defense and platform accountability.

Bailey also shifted attention beyond banks. He said fraud increasingly reaches victims through social-media platforms and apps, and called for technology companies to share responsibility for what moves through their services. He contrasted that environment with the legal accountability applied to British newspapers, while emphasizing that responsibility extends across the system rather than belonging to a single industry.

The same technology that strengthens cybercriminals should also be deployed defensively, Bailey said. The Bangkok panel marked the launch of a new set of international principles for financial institutions seeking to prevent cyber-fraud, called the Bangkok blueprint. The Guardian did not detail the blueprint’s specific requirements, participating institutions or enforcement mechanisms, so its practical effect remains uncertain.

The policy signal is nevertheless clear: senior financial officials are treating trust as part of the infrastructure that cyberattacks can damage. A successful intrusion may disrupt a service, but repeated fraud can also change how people behave—particularly if they believe platforms, banks and regulators cannot protect them. That makes AI security more than a technical contest between attackers and defenders; it becomes a question of whether digital finance remains credible to the public.