"Diffusion takes longer than people think," Mousavizadeh says. "You’re changing habits, not just flipping a switch." She draws a parallel with the internet, whose diffusion across banking took roughly a decade. She expects AI to move about twice as fast—still meaning approximately five years before the technology is broadly embedded.
Data quality is emerging as a foundational competitive divide. "Data readiness, working with data sets that are clean and not duplicated, is a source of competitive advantage now," Fernandez says. Banks that digitized and cleaned their records early are better positioned to feed AI models with reliable inputs.
Mythos, rogue agents, and the cybersecurity threat no one fully controls
The risks are not hypothetical. In April, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell convened top US bankers specifically to warn about cybersecurity dangers linked to Mythos, the latest model from Anthropic, the creator of Claude. A company statement acknowledged that Mythos had uncovered flaws in existing computer operating systems that "have in some cases survived decades of human review and millions of automated security tests."
Anthropic agreed to restrict Mythos to a handful of corporate clients in what the company described as "an urgent attempt to put these capabilities to work for defensive purposes." The episode illustrates how quickly AI capabilities can outpace the safeguards designed to contain them.
The threat is not limited to external attacks. As generative AI evolves into agentic models—systems that make decisions autonomously—banks face risks from within their own vendor ecosystems. "Risk is coming in through the back door, with vendors’ agents liaising with each other," Mousavizadeh warns. Firewalls may not be sufficient to prevent a rogue AI agent from infecting or co-opting connected systems.
Eric Alter, who recently retired as an AI engagement leader at Marsh in the UK, frames the structural problem bluntly: "Any financial institution works on a three- to five-year plan, while the tech horizon is six to 12 months. By the time a tool is deployed, it’s obsolete." Regulators, he and others note, tend to react only after a crisis—which, given AI’s potential reach across the financial system, may come too late.
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