The XVIII BRICS Summit held in New Delhi on 12–13 September 2026 may prove significant for the global financial sector for a reason that goes beyond geopolitics, trade or economic cooperation.
Across the New Delhi Declaration, a distinct financial-sector agenda is visible around risk, resilience, technology, insurance, credit, payments, climate finance and institutional capability building.
For banks, insurers, non-banking financial companies, regulators and risk professionals, the message is increasingly clear: financial resilience is becoming a cross-border, multidisciplinary challenge.
BRICS itself now represents substantial economic scale. According to the Prime Minister’s address at the BRICS Business Forum 2026, BRICS countries account for around 50% of the world’s population, 40% of global GDP and more than 25% of global trade. BRICS and its partner countries together now comprise 21 countries.
Against this backdrop, developments announced during India’s 2026 BRICS Chairship deserve close attention from the BFSI sector.
The emerging agenda extends from insurance resilience and common risk modelling to annual financial-sector cyber exercises, artificial intelligence and quantum risk, cross-border payment infrastructure, credit assessment, climate finance and systemic financial safety nets.
Taken together, these initiatives indicate something broader:
BRICS is gradually moving from conventional financial cooperation towards building shared risk and resilience capabilities.
BRICS 2026: Key BFSI and Risk Developments at a Glance
| Priority | Development | Principal BFSI relevance |
| 1 | BRICS Insurance Resilience Centre and proposed BRICS Risk Lab | Insurance, reinsurance, common risk models, specialised capabilities |
| 2 | Annual financial-sector cyber exercises | Cyber risk and operational resilience |
| 3 | AI, quantum computing and emerging technology risks | Technology risk, model risk and governance |
| 4 | BRICS Central Bank Hub for Capacity Building | Regulatory and institutional capability |
| 5 | Credit Assessment Frameworks for export-oriented MSMEs | Credit risk and alternative data |
| 6 | Cross-border payments interoperability | Payment, settlement, liquidity and operational risk |
| 7 | Climate finance and adaptation | Climate risk and sustainable finance |
| 8 | Disaster-risk early-warning systems | Catastrophe, infrastructure and insurance resilience |
| 9 | PPP de-risking and risk allocation | Infrastructure and project-finance risk |
| 10 | BRICS Contingent Reserve Arrangement | Systemic, liquidity and crisis resilience |
These developments should not be viewed as isolated policy announcements. They form parts of an increasingly interconnected resilience architecture.
1. BRICS Insurance Resilience Centre: Risk Cooperation Moves Closer to Institutionalisation
Perhaps the most directly relevant development for the insurance and risk-management community appears in Paragraph 92 of the New Delhi Declaration.
BRICS leaders recognised the need to build a more self-reliant insurance ecosystem capable of supporting trade between member countries and called for further discussion on strengthening reinsurance capacity.
More significantly, the Declaration welcomes continued discussions on a proposed BRICS Insurance Resilience Centre, or BIRC.
BIRC is envisaged as a voluntary shared-capability platform through which participating BRICS members could:
- develop common risk models;
- exchange insurance and risk-management best practices;
- build specialist capabilities; and
- strengthen insurance and reinsurance capacity.
India has also proposed hosting a BRICS Risk Lab at GIFT City International Financial Services Centre in Gujarat, open to interested BRICS members.
The Declaration envisages the voluntary participation of regulators and reinsurance companies from BRICS jurisdictions.
This is significant because insurance cooperation is moving beyond conventional policy dialogue.
The emerging concept involves shared risk intelligence and technical capability.
A mature BRICS Risk Lab could potentially support research and capability building across areas including catastrophe risk, marine insurance, trade risks, climate risk, emerging technology risks and reinsurance analytics.
Such a platform could also support greater consistency in how cross-border and emerging risks are understood.
2. Why Insurance Resilience Matters: The Protection Gap Remains Large
The case for strengthening insurance resilience becomes stronger when viewed against current global protection gaps.
Swiss Re estimates that the global natural-catastrophe protection gap reached approximately US$424 billion in 2025, up from US$395 billion a year earlier.
Its Natural Catastrophe Insurance Resilience Index suggests that only around 27% of global protection needs are insured, leaving almost three-quarters of exposure uninsured.
The challenge is particularly significant in emerging markets.
In Asia, natural catastrophes generated approximately US$65 billion in economic losses during 2025, but only 8% of those losses were insured.
That means approximately 92% remained uninsured.
Swiss Re notes that protection gaps remain particularly large in emerging Asian economies where rapid economic growth and asset accumulation are often not matched by equivalent insurance protection.
For BRICS economies, this creates a strategic policy question:
How can rapidly growing economies expand risk-bearing capacity at the same pace as their economic exposure?
The proposed BIRC and Risk Lab provide one possible response through common risk modelling, specialist capacity and stronger reinsurance cooperation.
3. Cyber Resilience Becomes a Shared Financial-Sector Priority
Cyber risk received unusually direct treatment in the Finance Track.
Paragraph 95 of the Declaration specifically refers to cybersecurity developments, artificial intelligence and emerging technologies such as quantum computing in the financial sector.
BRICS also recognised work undertaken through the BRICS Rapid Information Security Channel and the BRICS Fintech Working Group.
Most importantly, the Declaration states that BRICS Cyber Exercises and Drills should be conducted annually to strengthen financial-sector cyber resilience through coordinated approaches, practical cooperation and mutual learning.
This is noteworthy.
Cyber resilience is no longer being treated purely as an individual institution’s information-security responsibility.
Financial systems have become interconnected through payment networks, cloud service providers, application programming interfaces, financial technology platforms, market infrastructure and third-party technology providers.
As a result, operational disruption at one institution can propagate quickly across institutions and jurisdictions.
Annual cyber exercises therefore provide an opportunity to test:
- incident response;
- crisis communication;
- payment-system continuity;
- regulatory coordination;
- third-party dependencies;
- data recovery; and
- cross-border information sharing.
For banks and financial institutions, resilience increasingly depends not only on preventing attacks but on maintaining critical services when prevention fails.
4. AI and Quantum Computing Enter the Financial Risk Agenda
Another important shift is the explicit inclusion of artificial intelligence and quantum computing within the BRICS financial-sector risk conversation.
The Declaration refers to an emerging-market and developing-economy-centric approach for assessing both the opportunities and risks associated with these technologies.
The significance for financial institutions is considerable.
Artificial intelligence is already entering areas such as:
- credit underwriting;
- fraud detection;
- transaction monitoring;
- insurance pricing;
- claims management;
- customer service;
- investment management;
- financial forecasting; and
- regulatory compliance.
As adoption increases, institutions must simultaneously manage risks involving:
model performance, explainability, data quality, bias, cybersecurity, third-party dependence, privacy and human oversight.
Quantum computing introduces a different category of longer-term risk.
Its potential applications in optimisation and computational finance may be significant, but quantum capabilities could also challenge current encryption systems.
That creates implications for:
- payment infrastructure;
- financial-market communication;
- customer information;
- digital signatures;
- identity systems; and
- long-duration confidential financial data.
The broader lesson is that emerging technology risk cannot remain confined to technology departments.
It increasingly belongs within enterprise risk management, operational resilience and board-level governance.
5. Capacity Building Is Becoming Financial Infrastructure
Alongside cyber exercises, BRICS welcomed the creation of a Central Bank Hub for Capacity Building, intended to develop expertise in emerging areas of central banking.
This deserves more attention than it may initially receive.
Modern financial regulation increasingly requires multidisciplinary expertise.
Central banks and financial regulators must understand not only monetary policy and traditional prudential risks, but increasingly:
- cyber resilience;
- artificial intelligence;
- financial technology;
- climate-related financial risk;
- digital payments;
- cross-border capital flows;
- data governance; and
- emerging financial products.
Skills and institutional capability therefore become part of financial stability itself.
The same principle applies within regulated institutions.
A sophisticated regulatory framework cannot deliver effective resilience if banks, insurers and financial institutions lack professionals capable of implementing it.
This creates an important shift in how capacity building should be viewed.
Training is not merely a human-resource activity. It is an element of risk infrastructure.
6. A New Approach to MSME Credit Risk
BRICS 2026 also produced an important development for credit risk.
The Declaration welcomes the BRICS Guiding Principles for Credit Assessment Frameworks for Export-oriented MSMEs.
The framework encourages use of diverse and relevant data sources to:
- reduce information asymmetry;
- improve risk assessment; and
- expand access to formal finance for underserved MSMEs.
This reflects a wider transformation in credit underwriting.
Traditional MSME lending has often depended heavily on:
- financial statements;
- collateral;
- repayment histories; and
- banking relationships.
However, digital commerce and financial technology are creating additional data sources.
These may include:
- transaction histories;
- invoice flows;
- payment behaviour;
- tax records;
- logistics information;
- supply-chain relationships; and
- platform data.
Alternative data can potentially improve credit access, but it also introduces governance challenges.
Banks must ask:
How reliable is the data?
Who owns it?
How frequently is it updated?
Can the underlying model be explained?
Could the model create discriminatory outcomes?
How should third-party credit-scoring providers be validated?
The challenge is therefore not simply expanding credit.
It is expanding credit without weakening underwriting standards or model governance.
7. Invoice Discounting and Working-Capital Risk
The same paragraph welcomes the Jaipur Consensus to study a BRICS invoice-discounting mechanism.
Its objective is to help MSMEs unlock working capital and participate more effectively in international trade.
This creates opportunities for deeper trade-finance integration but also introduces familiar risk considerations.
Invoice financing depends critically upon the integrity of underlying transactions.
Potential risks include:
- fraudulent invoices;
- duplicate financing;
- false counterparties;
- concentration risk;
- cross-border enforceability;
- payment delays;
- buyer creditworthiness; and
- operational fraud.
Technology can reduce some of these risks through digital verification and transaction visibility.
However, technology does not eliminate the need for risk controls.
A cross-border invoice-discounting system would require strong frameworks for authentication, data sharing, dispute resolution and fraud prevention.
8. Cross-Border Payments: Efficiency Must Be Matched by Resilience
BRICS is also exploring greater interoperability between payment and messaging channels.
The Declaration acknowledges ongoing work examining cross-border interoperability and the use of local currencies for trade settlements and investments.
The stated objective is to facilitate payments that are:
faster, lower-cost, accessible, efficient, transparent and safe.
From a financial-sector perspective, the word safe is critical.
Greater interoperability can generate significant efficiencies, but it also creates new forms of interconnectedness.
Cross-border payment systems must manage:
- settlement risk;
- liquidity risk;
- operational risk;
- cyber risk;
- foreign-exchange risk;
- fraud;
- sanctions compliance;
- anti-money laundering controls; and
- data-protection requirements.
The challenge is therefore to develop payment infrastructure in which efficiency and resilience advance simultaneously.
A faster payment system that cannot withstand disruption may ultimately introduce greater systemic vulnerability.
9. Settlement Infrastructure and Regulatory Interoperability
BRICS members also conducted technical discussions on settlement and depositary infrastructure.
These discussions examined legal, institutional, regulatory and technological differences across participating jurisdictions.
For financial markets, settlement infrastructure is one of the less visible but most critical components of systemic resilience.
Failures or delays in settlement can generate:
- counterparty exposure;
- liquidity stress;
- collateral shortfalls;
- operational disruption; and
- transmission of risk across markets.
As cross-border investment expands, regulators will increasingly need to understand differences in custody, settlement, insolvency and market infrastructure frameworks.
This reinforces another theme running through the BRICS agenda:
cross-border financial integration cannot proceed without deeper understanding of cross-border risk.
10. PPP De-risking and Better Risk Allocation
Risk allocation is explicitly recognised in the Declaration’s discussion of public-private partnerships.
The BRICS PPP and Infrastructure Task Force has produced a technical report examining PPP models, modalities and de-risking mechanisms.
The stated aim includes strengthening PPP ecosystems and improving risk-allocation frameworks.
This distinction is important.
Successful infrastructure finance is not about eliminating risk.
It is about allocating each risk to the party best equipped to manage it.
Common PPP risks include:
- construction risk;
- financing risk;
- demand risk;
- regulatory risk;
- political risk;
- environmental risk;
- operational risk; and
- force majeure.
Poorly structured risk allocation can increase financing costs or create hidden contingent liabilities.
Better risk allocation can improve project bankability while protecting both public authorities and private investors.
11. Climate Risk Moves Deeper Into Financial-Sector Governance
Climate-related financial risk also forms a significant part of the BRICS Finance Track.
The Declaration recognises that emerging markets and developing economies face disproportionate climate-related risks and large adaptation-financing gaps.
It welcomes a report examining the role of central banks in sustainable and green finance, including adaptation, and discusses efforts to improve the bankability of climate-finance projects.
This reflects the increasing financial significance of climate change.
Banks face potential impacts through:
- borrower defaults;
- collateral deterioration;
- business interruption;
- sectoral transition;
- agricultural losses; and
- infrastructure damage.
Insurers face changing:
- catastrophe frequency;
- severity assumptions;
- pricing models;
- underwriting capacity; and
- claims experience.
Climate risk therefore increasingly affects both sides of financial intermediation.
It is simultaneously:
a credit risk, underwriting risk, market risk, operational risk and strategic risk.
12. Disaster Resilience: From Response to Anticipatory Risk Management
The Declaration also adopts a more forward-looking approach to disaster resilience.
BRICS welcomed the Guidelines for Disaster Management Early Warning Data Integration and the Voluntary Principles for Climate-Resilient Urban Infrastructure.
It emphasised:
- prevention;
- anticipatory action;
- evidence-based policymaking;
- early-warning systems; and
- risk-informed planning.
This represents an important conceptual shift.
Traditional disaster management often focused heavily on response and recovery.
The emerging approach gives more weight to understanding risk before the event occurs.
For insurance and banking, stronger early-warning data could improve:
- catastrophe modelling;
- geographical risk assessment;
- infrastructure financing;
- insurance underwriting;
- portfolio stress testing; and
- risk pricing.
The same data could also help governments and businesses invest more effectively in adaptation.
13. Financial Safety Nets and the BRICS Contingent Reserve Arrangement
Financial resilience also requires mechanisms capable of responding during periods of systemic stress.
BRICS therefore continues work on strengthening its Contingent Reserve Arrangement.
The Declaration notes efforts to improve operational resilience and make the mechanism more responsive during crises.
Proposed amendments are intended to make the CRA more flexible and strengthen its role as a BRICS financial safety net.
For risk professionals, this illustrates an important distinction between institutional and systemic resilience.
Individual financial institutions may maintain:
- liquidity buffers;
- capital reserves;
- contingency funding plans; and
- recovery frameworks.
At the international level, similar principles apply through arrangements intended to provide support during liquidity or financial stress.
Resilience therefore operates at multiple layers:
institution → financial system → national economy → international financial architecture.
14. The Broader Pattern: BRICS Is Creating Shared Capability Platforms
One of the most interesting features of BRICS 2026 is the recurring use of shared platforms for knowledge and capability development.
Examples include:
- the proposed BRICS Risk Lab;
- the proposed BRICS Insurance Resilience Centre;
- the Central Bank Hub for Capacity Building;
- the BRICS Rapid Information Security Channel;
- annual cyber exercises;
- Customs Centres of Excellence;
- the BRICS Tax Cross-Learning Lab; and
- various research and technical cooperation platforms.
This suggests an institutional philosophy based on:
knowledge sharing + common frameworks + technical collaboration + specialised capabilities + practical exercises.
For risk management, this model is especially relevant because many modern risks cannot be managed effectively by institutions acting in isolation.
Cyber risk crosses institutions.
Climate risk crosses sectors.
Supply-chain risk crosses borders.
Insurance catastrophe risk crosses markets.
Financial crime crosses jurisdictions.
Artificial intelligence crosses regulatory disciplines.
Collective capability therefore becomes increasingly important.
15. What BRICS 2026 Means for Banks
For banks, the emerging agenda creates several immediate areas of attention.
Credit risk
Alternative data and new credit-assessment frameworks could transform MSME underwriting but require strong model governance.
Technology risk
AI, quantum computing and cyber resilience are becoming mainstream banking-risk issues.
Operational resilience
Annual cyber exercises and greater payment-system interconnectedness increase the importance of tested continuity and recovery arrangements.
Payment and settlement risk
Cross-border interoperability creates opportunities but also introduces additional settlement, liquidity and compliance dependencies.
Climate risk
Central-bank attention to climate finance and adaptation indicates that climate considerations will increasingly intersect with banking strategy and credit assessment.
Capability risk
As regulatory and technological complexity increases, shortage of trained risk professionals itself becomes a strategic vulnerability.
16. What BRICS 2026 Means for Insurers and Reinsurers
For insurance, the implications are potentially even more significant.
The proposed BIRC and Risk Lab could encourage greater cooperation around:
- catastrophe modelling;
- marine insurance;
- climate risk;
- emerging risks;
- reinsurance;
- risk analytics; and
- specialist professional skills.
The global insurance protection gap demonstrates why these issues matter.
Swiss Re estimates that nearly three-quarters of global natural-catastrophe protection needs remained uninsured in 2025.
Emerging economies may therefore need not only additional insurance products, but stronger modelling, better risk data, deeper reinsurance capacity and greater technical capability.
A successful BRICS insurance-resilience initiative would need to address all four.
17. What BRICS 2026 Means for Risk Professionals
For risk professionals, perhaps the most important lesson is the expanding scope of the profession itself.
Today’s risk practitioner increasingly needs to understand the interaction between:
credit + technology + cyber + climate + insurance + data + regulation + geopolitics + operational resilience.
Traditional silos are becoming less effective.
A cyber incident can create liquidity risk.
A climate event can become credit risk.
An AI model can create conduct and regulatory risk.
A geopolitical event can become supply-chain risk.
A payment disruption can become systemic operational risk.
A catastrophe can become both an insurance-loss event and a banking-asset-quality problem.
Risk management must therefore become increasingly integrated.
18. From Risk Transfer to Risk Intelligence
Perhaps the most important change emerging from the BRICS agenda is the movement from risk transfer toward risk intelligence.
Insurance transfers part of a risk.
Reinsurance redistributes part of that exposure.
Capital buffers absorb losses.
But resilience also requires the ability to understand the underlying risk before losses occur.
That requires:
- better data;
- better modelling;
- scenario analysis;
- early-warning systems;
- common standards;
- specialist knowledge;
- tested response mechanisms; and
- cross-institutional cooperation.
The proposed BRICS Risk Lab embodies this direction particularly well.
Its importance would not lie simply in creating another institution.
Its value would depend upon whether it can convert cross-country cooperation into usable risk intelligence and practical risk-management capability.
19. Five Strategic Themes Emerging for BFSI
Viewed together, the 2026 initiatives can be organised into five broader themes.
1. Shared Risk Intelligence
Common risk models, alternative data, early-warning systems and collaborative research.
2. Financial Infrastructure Resilience
Payments, settlement infrastructure, reinsurance systems and financial safety nets.
3. Technology Resilience
Cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, quantum risk and financial technology.
4. Risk Financing
Insurance, reinsurance, infrastructure de-risking, sustainable finance and trade finance.
5. Capability Building
Risk labs, central-bank capacity platforms, technical cooperation and specialist skills.
This framework may ultimately prove more useful than analysing each BRICS initiative separately.
20. RMAI Perspective: Resilience Requires Institutions, Frameworks and People
For the Risk Management Association of India, the developments emerging from BRICS 2026 reinforce a fundamental principle.
Financial resilience cannot be built through regulation alone.
It requires three elements working together:
Institutions that facilitate collaboration.
Frameworks that provide consistency in how risks are assessed and governed.
People with the professional capability to apply those frameworks.
The proposed BRICS Insurance Resilience Centre, BRICS Risk Lab, annual cyber exercises and Central Bank Capacity Building Hub all point in this direction.
They recognise that emerging risks increasingly require not only capital but knowledge, analytics, specialist expertise and institutional coordination.
This is particularly important for emerging economies, where financial systems are expanding rapidly while risk landscapes are becoming more complex.
Conclusion
The XVIII BRICS Summit should not be viewed by the BFSI sector only through the traditional lenses of trade, currency cooperation or geopolitics.
The New Delhi Declaration contains a broader and potentially important agenda around financial resilience.
From the proposed BRICS Insurance Resilience Centre and BRICS Risk Lab to annual cyber exercises, AI and quantum-risk discussions, MSME credit-assessment frameworks, cross-border payment infrastructure, climate finance and financial safety nets, BRICS is beginning to develop mechanisms aimed at strengthening both financial integration and financial resilience.
The underlying direction is significant.
As financial systems become more interconnected, the risks facing them become more interconnected as well.
The next phase of financial-sector resilience will therefore require institutions to move beyond managing individual risks independently.
It will require shared risk intelligence, stronger modelling, better data, deeper technical capabilities, coordinated exercises and continuous professional capacity building.
For banks, insurers, regulators and risk professionals across BRICS economies, that may ultimately be one of the most important takeaways from New Delhi 2026.
The future of financial resilience will depend not only on how much risk institutions can absorb, but on how effectively they can understand, anticipate and manage risk together.
