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When Barclays experienced a three-day outage earlier this year, due to a mainframe failure, millions of UK customers were unable to access even the most basic banking services.

The disruption not only damaged the bank’s reputation but also left it facing a compensation bill of as much as £7.5mn. Incidents like this are becoming alarmingly common in the financial services sector.

Despite investing billions on state-of-the-art security tools and seeking to reassure both customers and regulators of their resilience, banks remain highly vulnerable. The increasing complexity of their software ecosystems and the long, tangled supply chains required to support them are key culprits.

In the UK, Barclays suffered 33 system failures between January 2023 and February 2025, according to data from the House of Commons Treasury select committee. Over the same period, HSBC and Santander were both hit by 32 outages.

From: Increasing reliance on complex technology leaves banks vulnerable.

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Agentic Wallets™ are built to integrate with any intelligence in order to create AI products that are smart, safe and personal. They bring the whole universe of data together via one channel, making it available to the AI in order to get the best outputs with the least effort:

This includes any information available on the web. But it also includes private data of all kinds. Buying preferences, medical records, IoT device data, pictures of your cat — whatever. And it integrates the transactions and credentials familiar from digital wallets today. Things like credit cards, boarding passes, tickets and increasingly, mobile drivers’ licenses (mDLs).

Bringing all this data together for each user via one channel is the crucial step in making AI personal and safe for customers. People work at the intersections of public, private and transactional data dozens of times a day in order to get things done online. But AIs can’t easily cross those boundaries. A simple instruction like “Make me a meal plan for this week” becomes much more powerful when the AI has access not only to internet recipes (public data), but also context-aware of my dietary restrictions (private data) and knowledge of what I bought at the grocery store yesterday (transactional data).

From: Agentic Wallets: Building AI-Driven Customer Experiences.

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ck in 2021, Mark Zuckerberg and other top Facebook executives were dreaming big about how to design the company’s first generation of smart glasses. One feature they considered adding to them was facial recognition, which would have allowed someone wearing the glasses to, say, identify a person they bumped into at a party. Ultimately, though, Zuckerberg and the others discarded the idea, which presented a mountain of both technical challenges and ethical questions about privacy invasion.

That was then. Facebook’s parent company, Meta Platforms, is once again actively working on facial recognition: Earlier this year, the company discussed adding software that could identify people by name to its smart glasses and other devices, such as artificial intelligence-powered earphones with cameras, according to three people involved in discussions about the feature.

Meta isn’t the only tech company rethinking its privacy decisions.

From: Meta Renews Work on Facial Recognition Tech as Privacy Worries Fade — The Information.

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According to Bank of Finland board member Tuomas Valimaki, several Nordic countries (incuding Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Estonia) are rolling out offline card payment systems to provide a back-up if internet connections are lost, including due to sabotage. Only 10% of people use cash as their primary payment method in Finland, central bank data shows, making the country highly dependent on card payments that require functioning international data links. More specifically 

Valimaki said the plans were still being developed, but offline payments can involve using terminals that encrypt and store transaction data until an internet connection can be restored.
Sweden’s central bank told Reuters that it hoped to establish a system by July 1, 2026, that would allow Swedes to make offline card payments to buy essential goods in the event of disruptions lasting up to seven days.
Central banks in Norway and Denmark said they had already launched offline electronic payments that they continue to develop.

From: Exclusive: Nordics and Estonia rolling out offline card payment back-up in case internet cut | Reuters.

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Speaking separately in Helsinki, NATO’s Head of Defence Planning Section, Christian-Marc Lilflander, said finance ministers should be more involved in discussions on security to better prepare for threats in financial services.

From: Exclusive: Nordics and Estonia rolling out offline card payment back-up in case internet cut | Reuters.

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Zelle, the popular peer-to-peer payment service, had a major breakdown on Friday, May 2, 2025, as customers of a number of banks discovered that they could not send or receive funds. The outage sparked a chain of complaints and confusion as consumers asked themselves what became of their money.

From: Zelle Outage 2025: Payments Fail for Major U.S. Banks.

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Stripe has introduced stablecoin-based accounts to clients in over 100 countries, allowing them to “to send, receive, and hold US-dollar stablecoin account balances” (in, for example, Circle’s USDC) which they note is “similar to how a traditional fiat bank account works”.

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For example, vaccination fraud has occurred where fraudsters phone the elderly and pretend they are from the healthcare services or an authority and will help them book a vaccination appointment. They then ask the person to login using their BankID, thus gaining access to the elderly persons bank account.

From: Social engineering.

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The European Commission will abandon plans to introduce rules requiring financial institutions to share information with customers and competitors after strong criticism from industry.
According to a document obtained by POLITICO, the Financial Data Access, or FiDA, regulation will be withdrawn within six months as it is “not aligned with Commission’s current objectives” and would introduce a “significant burden and complexity for financial actors” which goes against the EU executive’s goal to simplify rules.

From: Brussels U-turns on plans for more consumer financial data access – POLITICO.

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A Russian attack need not take the form of a missile strike. Just before the Paris Olympics, we saw the disruption that can be caused by arson attacks on the high-speed train network. While the perpetrators of this attack were not identified, we must not be naive about the hybrid threats we face. Ireland’s healthcare system was debilitated by a cyberattack from a Russian-based ransomware group in 2021. Russia’s military intelligence Unit 29155 has been behind sabotage campaigns across Europe. It expanded into cyberattacks in 2020, targeting critical infrastructure and government agencies across Nato, often with the aim of disrupting aid deliveries to Ukraine.

Europe needs to learn from Ukraine’s experience and step up its preparations. Well-maintained infrastructure and technology innovation such as quantum computing, AI and advanced cybersecurity are no longer just a question of economic competitiveness; they are critical for our defence and resilience. They should be given resources commensurate to these growing risks and to our total dependency on modern-day connectivity.

From: Europe’s critical infrastructure is becoming dangerously vulnerable.

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