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PwC Belgium FY25 Annual Report

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Global Banking Risk Study 2025

How to stay safe, keep pace and drive growth

Insight
8 minute read
November 19, 2025

Our dialogue with banking executives reveals how leading institutions need to evolve in response to the industry’s complex risk landscape.

Navigating the Future of Banking Risk

The evolving risk landscape calls for a strategic modernisation of risk management frameworks. This includes adopting agile technology-driven operating models that not only ensure robust oversight but also actively support business growth and innovation. Emphasising non-financial risks such as operational resilience, cybersecurity and third-party dependencies is critical particularly in light of stringent EU regulatory requirements. Leveraging AI and advanced digital tools will be essential to enhance risk insight and efficiency. Equally important is fostering leadership and workforce capabilities that embrace collaboration, adaptability and forward-looking thinking to successfully navigate increasing complexity and uncertainty. Download the full report to explore these insights and understand how your organisation can prepare for the future.

Explore the findings

Download the full PwC Global Banking Risk Study to explore actionable insights, benchmark your progress, and discover how leading institutions are turning risk into opportunity.

The line between opportunity and threat is blurring, as banking risks become more interconnected and fast-moving. Market turbulence, fiscal pressures, digital transformation, ESG expectations and cyber threats define the landscape in which you operate.

“Risk management cannot afford to be static. Its very purpose is evolving: from guardian of stability to navigator of movement. From controller of loss to enabler of resilience and growth.”

Mark Batten,Banking and capital markets leader, PwC UK

To understand how the industry is responding, we conducted our Global Banking Risk Study 2025, building on earlier editions from 2018 and 2021. We spoke with senior risk leaders – Chief Risk Officers (CROs), Heads of Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) and Non-Financial Risk (NFR) and Risk Chief Operating Officers (COOs) – from 50 institutions worldwide. This included global systemically important banks (GSIBs), large internationally active institutions and specialist and digital banks across North America, EMEA and the Middle East.

The study reveals clear patterns in how banks are organising their risk functions

The CRO is seen as a member of senior management with a responsibility for sustainable value creation. Risk functions are expected to contribute to streamlining of end-to-end processes, provide actionable insights and look beyond traditional organisational boundaries.

As business and operating environments accelerate, banks strengthen risk management to keep pace. As an illustration, leading banks aim to achieve more than 50% automation of GRC processes within the next 5 years, enabling a fundamental redesign of control and assurance models.

Banks are moving beyond productivity, focusing on reimagining risk processes using GenAI. This includes next generation scenario analysis capabilities as well as digital twins creating replicas of the organisation's processes and controls. An environment within which agents operate, transforming risk and response capabilities.

Risk leadership needs to prepare for a transition to a hybrid workforce connecting humans and autonomous agents. This includes managing a fundamental transition in the Risk workforce, with a growing emphasis on soft skills such as problem solving and critical thinking complementing the expectation of “digital fluency” in data and AI.

About half of participants expect significant shifts in business and operating models over the next ten years. As such, banks are supporting societal and economic transitions and seeing climate risks as opportunities. They’re also taking practical steps to strengthen forward-looking capabilities, evolving the ERM mandate while investing in the scenario analysis toolkit.

A new risk mindset for success in banking

Banks are cultivating a new risk mindset that can drive growth and innovation for decades. Supported by data, technology and a culture of shared accountability, this new approach is helping banks navigate uncertainty with confidence while placing customers and stakeholders firmly at the centre of decision-making. And it’s not just about performing better today. Banks that embed this mindset across their organisations will set the pace for the future of banking.

Explore the findings

Download the full PwC Global Banking Risk Study to explore actionable insights, benchmark your progress, and discover how leading institutions are turning risk into opportunity.

About the authors

Gregory Joos

Partner, Head of Financial Services, PwC Belgium

Carole de Vergnies

Director, PwC Belgium

Mickaël Ortega

Director, PwC Belgium

Guillaume Magdelyns

Director, PwC Belgium

Abdelmajid Lahrouchi

Director, PwC Belgium

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