Bank of Spain Governor sets out AI governance, digital central bank money and cyber resilience challenges for central banks

The Bank of Spain published Governor Jose Luis Escrivá’s presentation to the BIS Chapultepec Conference in Mexico, framing artificial intelligence and generative AI as a paradigm shift accelerating digital transformation across all central bank functions. He argued that central banks will need to capture productivity and analytical gains while adapting their policy, supervisory and operational frameworks to new technology-driven risks. The presentation highlighted financial-stability and supervisory challenges from digitalisation, including shifting sector credit risk profiles, investment-timing risks in adopting new technologies, deeper interdependencies with market infrastructures and technology suppliers, faster transactions and potential deposit substitution via stablecoins, and concentration and herding risks linked to common tools and third-party providers. On payments and market infrastructures, it pointed to work on wholesale CBDCs compatible with distributed ledger technology and tokenised assets, greater cross-border interoperability and standardisation, and stronger cybersecurity and resilience in the face of AI- and quantum-related threats, alongside continued access to retail central bank money in digital form. Escrivá also cited emerging AI use cases for monetary policy and communications, such as GDP and inflation nowcasting and text and sentiment analysis, while warning that scaling requires governance, talent and compute capacity, robust data confidentiality controls (including cloud and third-party risk management), and stronger international coordination to limit regulatory fragmentation through common risk methodologies and incident reporting.