A cyber-attack on a major financial services payments system could lead to global economic losses of $3.5 trillion, Lloyd’s of London has warned.

The insurance marketplace this week published details of a systemic risk scenario it carried out that modelled the global economic impact of a hypothetical but plausible cyber-attack on a major payments system over a five-year period.

In the scenario, the three countries that experienced the highest loss across the five years were the US at $1.1 trillion, followed by China at $470 billion, and Japan at $200 billion.

Lloyd's, which used global Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as its central measurement, also revealed that the global economic loss ranges from $2.2 trillion in the lowest severity scenario up to $16 trillion in the most extreme scenario.

However, the company added that $140 billion is the expected global economic loss, due to this being the" sum-product of the five-year economic loss and the probability of the event occurring".

“We are committed to building resilience around systemic risk and the risk scenario released today highlights the important role of insurance in supporting and protecting customers against the potential threat cyber poses to businesses and society,” said Bruce Carnegie-Brown, Lloyd’s chairman.

The chairman added that the global interconnectedness of cyber means it is too substantial a risk for one sector to face alone, adding that knowledge should be shared across government, industry, and the insurance market to "build resilience" against the potential scale of the risk.

The insurance firm said that the recovery time for a cyber-attack on a global payments system for individual countries or regions "depends on the structure of their economy, exposure levels and resilience".

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