At the BRICS Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors meeting held in Mumbai on September 10, 2026, finance-sector discussions explicitly covered cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, and quantum computing, assessing both the opportunities and the risks these technologies bring to the financial sector. This sits alongside the broader BRICS Leaders’ Statement on the Global Governance of Artificial Intelligence, first adopted at the 2025 Rio Summit and reaffirmed at the 18th BRICS Summit in New Delhi in September 2026, and both developments point in the same direction, financial institutions can no longer treat AI and quantum risk as a distant, theoretical concern.
For risk professionals, model risk teams, RBI officers, and banking HR leaders responsible for capability building, this is a clear signal that emerging technology risk is moving from a specialist, technology department topic into mainstream banking risk management, credit risk, operational risk, and enterprise risk alike.
What Was Actually Agreed on AI and Quantum Risk
The BRICS Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors Joint Statement sets out several concrete commitments relevant to financial sector technology risk.
- Member countries adopted an EMDE-centric approach, meaning an approach centred on emerging market and developing economies, to assess the opportunities and risks posed by technologies including AI and quantum computing for the financial sector
- The BRICS Seminar on AI in Finance and a Roundtable on Quantum Opportunities and Risks were held as concrete steps toward this assessment
- Members contributed to shaping the Approach Paper on AI in Finance and the AI Governance and Enablement Toolkit
- Members shared best practices on the adoption of RegTech and SupTech, technology used respectively for regulatory compliance and supervisory oversight, across their jurisdictions
- BRICS welcomed a dedicated study on Opportunities and Risks from Quantum Computing for the Financial Sector
- The BRICS Fintech Working Group was encouraged to continue policy dialogue and knowledge sharing on harnessing these technologies responsibly
- Separately, the New Delhi Declaration reaffirmed the BRICS Leaders’ Statement on the Global Governance of Artificial Intelligence, calling for wider and more equitable access to AI resources while flagging coordinated action against AI-enabled risks such as deepfakes and misinformation
Why This Matters for Financial Institutions
Financial systems sit at a genuine convergence point for AI and quantum risk, since both technologies are moving from experimental to operational use inside banks, insurers, and NBFCs at the same time regulators are still building the frameworks to govern them.
- AI is already embedded in credit scoring, fraud detection, customer segmentation, and increasingly agentic decision-making workflows, meaning model risk, bias, and explainability concerns are no longer confined to a specialist analytics team
- Quantum computing carries a distinct, longer-horizon risk, its potential to eventually challenge current encryption standards that protect financial data and transactions, even though practical, large-scale quantum decryption capability is still some years away
- The RegTech and SupTech best-practice sharing signals that regulators themselves are adopting these technologies for supervision, which means institutions should expect more technology-driven scrutiny of their own risk data and reporting
- An EMDE-centric approach specifically means institutions in India and other BRICS economies should not simply adopt frameworks built for developed market contexts without adapting them to local infrastructure, data availability, and risk conditions
Read Now: BRICS 2026 and the Emerging Risk & Resilience Agenda for BFSI
What This Means for Risk, Model Governance and HR Teams
This agenda creates specific, practical implications across several functions inside a bank, insurer, or NBFC.
- Model risk and validation teams need to build genuine capability in assessing AI systems for explainability, bias, and governance, not just predictive accuracy, in line with the direction RBI’s own draft Guidance on Regulatory Principles for Model Risk Management has already taken
- Technology and information security teams need to start factoring quantum-safe cryptography readiness into long-term infrastructure planning, even ahead of an immediate regulatory mandate
- RBI officers and supervisory teams should expect RegTech and SupTech adoption to accelerate, changing how institutions are examined and what technology-based evidence they will be expected to produce
- Banking HR and L&D leaders need to identify who across the organisation, from data science and model validation teams to compliance officers to board members, requires AI and quantum risk literacy, and at what depth
Read Now: RBI’s FREE AI Framework 2026: 7 Sutras and Practical Implementation Roadmap
Conclusion
BRICS moving AI and quantum computing risk from a technology sidebar into a formal finance-sector agenda item reflects where global regulatory attention is genuinely heading. Institutions that build model governance, technology risk, and workforce capability now, rather than waiting for a domestic mandate that mirrors this international discussion, will be far better positioned as these technologies move deeper into everyday financial decision-making.
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