As banks deepen their use of cloud services, AI and digital payments, supervisors are putting greater emphasis on preventing disruption and protecting customers.
The digital trade-off
Digital services have made routine banking faster and more accessible. Yet the same infrastructure creates complex dependencies on software, data, external technology firms and constantly available networks. A June 2026 report from the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision examines how banks manage information and communication technology incidents that are not necessarily malicious, such as system outages and technology failures. The message is clear: resilience involves the ability to continue critical services, not merely blocking cyberattacks. [1]
Fraud is a strategic risk
Digital fraud has become part of the banking operating environment. The European Banking Authority’s June 2026 risk assessment identifies cyber and data-security issues as major operational concerns and reports that fraud was viewed as a key risk by 52% of respondents to its risk-assessment questionnaire. Switzerland’s FINMA also published guidance in April after surveying banks on digital fraud, stressing risks both to customers and to financial integrity when accounts are misused to move illicit proceeds. These assessments concern supervisory samples and should not be read as an estimate of global fraud losses. [2] [3]
Beyond technology departments
Resilience increasingly demands decisions from bank boards and executive committees. Critical-service mapping, vendor due diligence, recovery testing, incident escalation and customer communication must work together. For example, a payments outage may begin as a technical error but quickly become a liquidity, conduct and reputational issue. Likewise, an attractive new AI feature may depend on external models or infrastructure whose failure modes are not transparent to the bank. The Basel Committee’s observed practices suggest that technology oversight belongs in the wider operational-risk framework. [1]
The new customer expectation
Customers rarely distinguish between outages caused by a bank’s systems and failures originating at a third-party provider. They experience the same immediate result: lost access to their money or an inability to complete a transaction. That makes continuity and trustworthy communication elements of service quality, not simply regulatory compliance. Banks competing through digital convenience will therefore need to demonstrate that growth has not weakened core controls. [2] [1]
What strong execution looks like
The practical priorities are to identify which services must stay available, test recovery under plausible disruption scenarios, monitor dependency concentration, and apply proportionate controls to new tools before deployment. Equally important is fraud prevention that does not impose unnecessary barriers on legitimate customers. As digital banking matures, competitive advantage is likely to depend as much on reliability and trust as on the speed of the next product launch. [1] [3]
References
1. Basel Committee, ICT Risk Management Practices, June 2026. Source link
2. European Banking Authority, Risk Assessment Report, June 2026. Source link
3. FINMA, Guidance on Digital Fraud Risks, April 2026. Source link