The banking and financial sector is undergoing a phase of accelerated restructuring since the beginning of 2024. Several structural axes are reshaping practices: enhanced supervision of cyber risk related to artificial intelligence, integration of climate risk into prudential exercises, and the rise of open finance. These banking trends are no longer speculative; they are already altering regulatory obligations and the technological choices of institutions.
Cyber Supervision and AI: What the ECB Now Requires from Banks
In 2024, European banking supervisors reached a milestone by treating AI as a specific aggravating factor of cyber risk. The European Central Bank has sent letters to the leaders of significant institutions requesting dedicated and dated action plans, with formal follow-up by supervisory teams.
Related reading : Everything You Need to Know About Conditions and Guarantees for Obtaining a Student Loan in 2024
This tightening is not limited to general IT security recommendations. Expectations focus on three specific areas: accelerated detection of vulnerabilities driven by AI, modernization of legacy systems, and management of risk related to third-party ICT providers. Banks relying on cloud providers or generative AI solution vendors must now formally document these dependencies.
Regulatory news in this area is evolving rapidly, and professionals following publications on banque-et-finance.fr regularly find analyses on these new prudential requirements. The underlying trend is clear: regulators no longer wait for incidents to occur before acting.
Recommended read : Trends and Tips for Successful Real Estate Investments in 2024
Climate Risk Integrated into Prudential Stress Tests
Banking stress tests are undergoing a structural transformation. Until recently, climate scenarios remained isolated exercises, separate from the traditional supervisory cycle. In 2024, European authorities are working to integrate climate risk and nature risk directly into ongoing prudential supervision.
The stated goal is to simplify the format of stress tests while making physical and transition risk scenarios more stringent. Banks must estimate the impact of warming scenarios on their credit portfolios, taking into account exposed sectors (energy, agriculture, real estate).
What This Changes for Risk Management
For risk management departments, this integration requires cross-referencing traditional financial data with still poorly standardized environmental data. Efforts in data collection and modeling are significantly increasing. Institutions that had treated ESG as a communication exercise are discovering that climate stress tests are becoming a real prudential evaluation criterion.
The results of these exercises could eventually influence capital requirements. Supervisors are not there yet, but the trajectory is set.
Generative AI in Financial Services: Beyond the Announcement Effect
Generative AI has dominated strategic discussions in the banking sector since the emergence of ChatGPT. Several sector analyses estimate that this technology could generate significant productivity gains for financial institutions by automating document-heavy and analytical tasks.
In practice, the use cases deployed in 2024 remain concentrated in a few areas:
- Document processing automation (compliance, KYC, contract analysis), where time savings can be quickly measured
- Assistance to customer advisors, with real-time summarization and recommendation tools during interactions
- Enhanced fraud detection, combining traditional predictive models with pattern analysis through generative AI
Banks remain cautious about deployments that involve direct contact with customers. Risks of bias, hallucination, and data leakage pose regulatory and reputational barriers that institutions take seriously.
Open Finance and Collaboration with Fintechs: A Model That is Taking Shape
Open banking, regulated in Europe by the DSP2 directive, is evolving into a broader framework: open finance extends data sharing beyond payment accounts, to savings, insurance, and credit. This trend is redefining relationships between traditional banks and fintechs.
In 2024, collaborations with third parties are multiplying. Banks are no longer systematically trying to develop in-house: they are integrating specialized technological components (alternative scoring, financial wellness tools, gamification interfaces) through structured partnerships.
Financial Wellness and Customer Activation
Among the trends gaining traction, financial wellness tools are becoming a permanent feature of digital banks’ offerings. These features (spending alerts, automatic categorization, personalized savings goals) meet the expectations of retail customers facing a context of persistent inflation.
Customer activation, a term that refers to the ability to transform a registered user into an active and engaged user, is becoming a central performance indicator for digital banking projects. Institutions are now measuring the success of a digital service not by the number of account openings, but by the actual usage rate of features.
Operational Resilience and Strengthened Prudential Requirements
Efforts towards operational resilience are among the sector’s priorities in 2024. Recent crises (geopolitical tensions, cyberattacks targeting the financial sector, disruptions in technology supply chains) have accelerated awareness.
Regulators expect banks to demonstrate their ability to maintain critical services in the event of a major disruption. This involves:
- Regular business continuity tests including scenarios of cloud provider failures
- An updated mapping of critical technological dependencies, including second-tier subcontractors
- Strengthening practices for managing geopolitical risk, with scenarios of market fragmentation
Resilience is no longer a topic confined to IT teams. It has risen to the level of executive committees and boards of directors, where it is subject to dedicated reporting.
The banking and financial sector is approaching the end of 2024 with more granular regulatory constraints than before, particularly regarding cyber risk related to AI and climate risk. Institutions that anticipated these trends have a measurable operational advantage. For others, compliance deadlines are tightening.