Beyond credit risk: Cybersecurity and digital fraud

As SME finance moves onto digital rails, the decisive risk is shifting. The question is no longer only whether a borrower will repay, but whether the identity, the transaction, and the data behind them are real. Digital lending, open finance, and instant payments have widened the attack surface, and frontier AI now arms both sides: the same models that sharpen fraud detection also mass-produce synthetic identities, deepfakes, and forged documents. Small firms, with the thinnest defences, are the easiest targets and, often, the weakest link.

This roundtable moves beyond credit risk to the operational threats that now shape SME finance: cybersecurity, digital fraud, and the new exposures created by AI and agentic systems. It asks how lenders, fintechs, and regulators can share fraud intelligence, secure AI models, assign liability when fraud occurs, and protect SMEs without slowing legitimate access to finance.