The UK Financial Conduct Authority on Tuesday published its Emerging Technology Horizon Scan 2026, identifying personalised intelligence, synthetic crime, and programmable finance as the headline themes shaping financial services.
The corporate report gives firms an early read on the areas the FCA sees as reshaping conduct, fraud risk and market infrastructure.
On personalised intelligence, the regulator said AI tools are becoming more embedded in consumers’ financial lives, changing how people budget, save, and make financial choices. The FCA said this raises questions around autonomy, digital exclusion, and harm.
On synthetic crime, the report said synthetic media, including audio and video deepfakes, is becoming harder to distinguish from real content. That could expose consumers and firms to new forms of fraud and deception, the FCA said.
On programmable finance, the regulator said the underlying ‘plumbing’ of the global financial system is changing as protocol-based infrastructure moves from pilots to national strategies, citing tokenisation, smart contracts, and shared ledgers.
The FCA said these technologies are converging inside the same financial ecosystem.
The regulator said it wants to understand technological change “to anticipate its outcomes and gain early insight on what it may mean for financial services and for us as a regulator.”
