The risks of imposing disruptive technologies, such as AI, shot up the agenda for UK C-suite executives in the financial services industry over the last two years, according to a poll conducted by Accenture.

According to the findings, 31% of financial services chiefs in the UK were concerned about new technologies, compared with 25% globally. Of all the risk factors that have increased in the last two years, disruptive technologies were the second most significant for UK executives, only behind regulatory and compliance risks (33%). Disruptive technology risk ranked fourth among global executives.

Over a third (35%) of UK executives said that implementing disruptive tech has escalated the importance of market, credit and liquidity risks, compared with a global average of 29%. Among the global sample, operational risk factors (cyber attacks, supply chain disruption) were seen to be more significantly impacted by implementing disruptive technologies (39%).

In contrast, climate change and environmental risks were ranked towards the bottom of the factors that had risen up the agenda in terms of their potential impact. Just 17% of executives said climate risks had become significantly more important, compared with a global average of 24%. UK respondents said that climate risks had most impacted their concerns around broader financial risks (56%), compared with just 24% globally. They were also more concerned that climate risk would most escalate the importance of operational risks (34%).

Heather Adams, managing director, head of risk strategy and consulting at Accenture commented: “Implementing artificial intelligence has shot up the agenda for businesses across all sectors in the last two years, as business growth and efficiency benefits are becoming clearer. Amid the hype, it’s little surprise to see that UK financial services firms are increasingly concerned about the risks its implementation could pose to their businesses.

“New innovative technologies inherently bring some uncertainty and with uncertainty comes risk in the short term. But the potential is even greater and so to mitigate these risks, UK financial services businesses must implement robust governance frameworks and ensure thorough data quality control, something they are uniquely well-placed to do due to heavy regulation and governance requirements in the sector. If embraced in a safe and responsible way, AI and other disruptive technology will help mitigate some of the other risks, such as operational threats and talent productivity.”

The UK findings in this report are based on a relatively small sample of just 54 C-suite (78%) and senior risk leadership (22%) personnel in banking, insurance and capital markets in the UK between April and June 2023. Just under half of these were from companies with at least £8bn in revenues.

The global financial services findings are based on responses from 353 C suite respondents across Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Spain, the UAE and the US.

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