ICBC President Liu Jun: Financial Institutions Urgently Need to Enhance Precise Capture and Pricing Capabilities for Non-Economic Risks

How does AI · Intelligent Agent-based Financial Services buffer multidimensional risks?

On March 23, Liu Jun, President of the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, stated at the 2026 China Development High-Level Forum that the current uncertainty in the international economy is increasingly dominated by non-economic factors. Global risks are no longer linear time series but have evolved into a multidimensional risk matrix.

Liu Jun believes that in the face of rapidly evolving risks, it is necessary to reshape a credible international cooperation system, which can be called “Globalization 2.0.” This involves jointly addressing global issues such as climate change and AI governance to inject certainty into a transforming world, reduce risk premiums, and achieve win-win outcomes for all parties. For financial institutions, this transformation requires fundamental changes across three strategic dimensions.

First, re-pricing non-economic and non-market risks. Liu Jun pointed out that in the past, financial institutions mainly focused on credit risk, market risk, and liquidity risk. Today, the variables they face are more complex and dynamically evolving. Risks such as geopolitical tensions and wars can develop into systemic risks. Traditional risk models based on historical data and experience are no longer sufficient. Therefore, there is an urgent need to enhance precise detection and pricing of non-economic risks by utilizing big data, AI, remote sensing technologies, and other tools to build an engineered financial risk management system, enabling scientific quantification of various extreme risks.

Second, cultivating π-shaped talent in the digital age. Liu Jun believes that in the AI era, innovation increasingly depends on deep vertical expertise and cognition in specific fields. “We need π-shaped talents because they possess both horizontal broadness in career development and vertical deep specialization. Ideally, π-shaped talents should not only have expertise in two fields but also have the ability to conduct in-depth research across multiple disciplines, better equipping them to address the knowledge integration challenges brought by AI and intelligent agents.”

Third, advancing towards multidimensional systematic and intelligent agent-based financial services. Traditional flat and passive financial services can no longer meet the new demands brought by global restructuring and rising economic uncertainties. Therefore, it is necessary to deeply integrate support across the entire lifecycle and the full industry chain, building a systematic financial service framework for the real economy. Such financial institutions will transform into comprehensive service providers of capital, information, and efficiency, allowing risks at individual nodes to be buffered and mitigated within a multidimensional grid.