Report · Academia and think tanks
The 2026 Global AI in Financial Services Report: Adoption, impact and risks
The CCAF report measures how much financial firms, vendors and regulators use AI, what impact it has and which risks concern them.
- Organization
- Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance (CCAF), University of Cambridge
- Document date
- April 2026
- Type
- Report
- Language
- English
- Scope
- International
- Length
- 140 pages
What it contains
The 2026 report from the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance (CCAF), with partners such as the BIS, the IMF, the World Economic Forum and the IDB, brings together the perspectives of 628 organizations in 151 jurisdictions: 203 fintechs, 149 traditional financial institutions, 146 AI vendors and 130 central banks and other regulators. Latin America and the Caribbean contributes 101 industry responses, 44 from vendors and 32 from regulators. Some 81% of the financial firms surveyed are adopting AI at some level and 40% report advanced adoption, more than double that of regulators (20%); however, only 14% of the industry sees AI as transformational for its strategy, which suggests an execution and integration gap.
Generative AI (71%) and agentic AI (52% in active adoption) are the frontiers with fewer adoption barriers than traditional methods, with classical machine learning at 75%; 81% of the industry expects agentic AI to be meaningfully achieved by 2030. Current uses are concentrated in internal operations, with process automation (79%) and customer support (74%) among the most common; in risk and compliance, fraud detection (57%) and credit risk modelling (54%) stand out. Some 55% of the industry and 63% of regulators find it difficult to measure the value of AI; 40% report higher profitability and 43% no change. The main constraints are data quality, talent and legacy systems.
On risks, data privacy and protection (74% of the industry and 80% of regulators) and hallucinations or unreliable model outputs (70% in both groups) head the concerns; operational and cyber resilience, model opacity, loss of human oversight and AI-based cyber threats follow. Regulators are more concerned than vendors about cyber and operational resilience (59% versus 32%) and about critical third-party risk (43% versus 23%). All three parties agree that clearer regulatory guidance is needed (69% of the industry, 67% of vendors and 79% of regulators) and on the importance of human oversight.
Why it matters for risk management
It allows comparing a firm’s own AI maturity, uses and risks with those of the industry and regulators, with data from Latin America and the Caribbean included in the sample. The sample was gathered through professional networks and relationships with institutions, so the figures are a reference and not an exact measurement.
Summary prepared by the Dominican Republic Risk Management Club from a reading of the original document, with the source verified on 12 October 2026. It does not replace reading the official text and is not advice.
Connect with our networks