The Bank of England has released the results of its Systemic Risk Survey 2018 H1 survey, and shows the number of companies reporting cyber-attack risk reach a new high.
For the opening half of the year, 62 per cent of the respondents to the survey cited cyber-attacks as a risk, an increase of 5 percentage points on last year and the third consecutive survey the number has risen.
The Systemic Risk Survey is a biannual survey which asks market participants about perceived risks to, and their confidence in the UK financial system. For this survey, which took place between 9 April and 3 May, 87 market participants took part, representing an 83 per cent response rate.
While there has been this consecutive growth, cyber-risk was only the joint second perceived risk, with geopolitical risk also cited by 62 per cent of respondents as a risk. The biggest perceived threat to the financial system was UK political risk, which was cited by 91 per cent of respondents. Of these responses, 80 per cent mentioned implications of Brexit.
UK political risk was also the named as the number one source of risk, with 53 per cent of participants showing concern, but this is a decrease of 14 percentage points from 2017 H2. Cyber-risk was seen as the second biggest threat, with 14 per cent of people naming its threat, double the percentage points of 2017 H2.
Despite the dominance of the perceived threat of the UK political risk, there was only a small difference in the percentage of people that cited it and cyber-risk as one of the most challenging risks to manage. There were 52 per cent of people that stated UK political risk as a challenge to manage, and 51 per cent cited cyber-risk as one of the biggest challenges.
There has been a slight increase in the probability of a high‑impact event in the UK financial system in the short-term. However, confidence in the UK financial market over the next three years has increased, with 94 per cent of respondents ‘judging themselves to be fairly confident, very confident or completely confident’, and increase of four per cent.
Copyright © 2018 RegTech Analyst
Copyright © 2018 RegTech Analyst
