Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey and IMF managing director Kristalina Georgieva warned at an IMF/World Bank event in Bangkok that an unresolved cyber attack on a systemically important bank or core market infrastructure could cascade into financial-stability risk — with Georgieva warning that unless trust in money is preserved, savers may revert to keeping "shoeboxes under their beds" rather than depositing with banks. The warning coincided with the IMF's latest Global Financial Stability Report, which treats cyber threats as a systemic risk as financial services becomes more digitally connected, and cites three aggravating factors: growing dependence on interconnected technologies, increasing reliance on a small number of critical technology providers, and increasingly sophisticated threats, including state-sponsored actors, ransomware groups and insiders wielding frontier AI models that have demonstrated strong network-attack capabilities. A major attack affecting payments, trading or access to deposits could cause immediate losses and undermine confidence. The concentration argument applies directly to the cloud, payments and market-data providers Australian and NZ banks share.

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