Hardik Shah (MD & Partner, BCG India), FIBAC 2026, AI Cyber Risk & Governance.

Speaking at FIBAC 2026, Boston Consulting Group (BCG) MD Hardik Shah outlined why scaling AI in Indian banking requires a fundamental overhaul of enterprise risk governance.

While AI promises massive operational efficiency, cyber risk has emerged as the single largest bottleneck to enterprise AI deployment.

BCG’s core strategic takeaways on AI governance in banking:

→ The 17x Cyber Attack Cost Collapse: Automated AI attack tools have reduced cyberattack costs 17-fold, enabling threat actors to execute high-frequency, complex fraud against legacy banking rails. → Process Overhaul over Task Automation: Banks must move beyond automating isolated tasks and redesign end-to-end workflows around strict human accountability and model explainability. → Shared Cyber Defense Utilities: Cybersecurity can no longer be fought by individual banks in silos—requiring industry-level shared security infrastructure and collaborative threat intelligence rails. → A National AI Banking Sandbox: Establishing a shared AI sandbox (built on Digital Public Infrastructure like ULI and Account Aggregator) to safely evaluate generative AI models before live deployment.