EU financial regulators have warned governments that banks, funds and insurers rely heavily on non-EU providers and infrastructure, leaving the bloc’s financial system exposed to geopolitical shocks, cyberattacks and foreign political or regulatory decisions. The Joint Committee of the European Supervisory Authorities, comprising the European Banking Authority, the European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority and the European Securities and Markets Authority, delivered its autumn findings to the Financial Stability Table of the EU’s Economic and Financial Committee on 10 September 2026, before the details were made public today. The authorities highlighted U.S. exposures among Equity UCITS funds and alternative investment funds, dependence on information and communications technology suppliers and payment systems outside the European Economic Area, and funding gaps in currencies that EU institutions do not issue, mainly dollars, sterling and Swiss francs. Clearing, repo and credit ratings also depend largely on non-EU firms. The regulators said frontier AI models can rapidly identify and exploit software weaknesses, potentially increasing the damage from AI-assisted attacks. ENISA, Europe’s cybersecurity agency, reported more than 48,000 new vulnerabilities in 2025, a 22% increase, and said threat groups are using AI more often. Quantum computing remains a longer-term concern for crypto markets because a sufficiently powerful machine could derive a private key from an exposed public key and enable unauthorized transactions. No such computer exists yet, but Google Quantum AI researchers estimated in March that breaking the cryptography used by many cryptocurrencies could require roughly 20 times fewer physical qubits than previously thought. Developers are pursuing countermeasures: Jameson Lopp and five collaborators proposed retiring Bitcoin’s current signature scheme in February, while the Ethereum Foundation is targeting stronger protection against quantum attacks by December 2029. Private credit is another area under scrutiny. EU and EEA banks’ related exposures equal just 0.6% of total assets, but the ESAs said the fast-growing and opaque market warrants close monitoring.