Reliance on U.S. technology presents a “geopolitical risk,” says Starling exec and government’s artificial intelligence liaison for the City.
In Britain, banks will meet in mid-March to discuss account-to-account payments, a system which would also bypass Visa and Mastercard by allowing payments directly between bank accounts. | Richard Baker/In Pictures via Getty Images
LONDON – The U.K. government must move to protect the financial services industry from the potential costs of an unpredictable Trump administration, the City of London's newly appointed artificial intelligence czar told POLITICO.
City firms which are “heavily reliant on U.S. technology” face the “risk” of changes beyond their control due to the climate of uncertainty stemming from U.S. President Donald Trump's government, said Harriet Rees, who is one of two appointments by the U.K. Treasury to champion artificial intelligence adoption in financial services.
“I definitely see a geopolitical risk right now when it comes to our relationship with U.S. technology, our reliance on it,” said Rees, who serves as the chief information officer at Starling Bank.
She added: “Within my role as AI champion, I will be looking for some more confidence for the industry as to what the government is doing to protect firms, or what mitigations the industry needs to be put in place, so that we’ve got the confidence that we won’t be out of pocket for the things that we don’t have any input over."
Her warnings come as multiple sectors are eyeing ways to diversify away from the U.S., particularly in the EU, in the wake of Trump's ongoing tariff war and threat to use force to take Greenland. In financial services, the focus is on creating a new payments system to replace U.S. card heavyweights Visa and Mastercard.
Aurore Lalucq, a left-leaning member of the European Parliament, said last month: “The urgency is our payment system. Trump can cut us off from everything.”
In Britain, banks will meet in mid-March to discuss account-to-account payments, a system which would also bypass Visa and Mastercard by allowing payments directly between bank accounts. But regulators in the U.K. insist plans are about “resilience” rather than an intention to cut out the U.S.
Industry plans should take into account this eventuality, Rees argued.
"We see that the U.S. is prepared to make changes, be it tariffs, be it the way trade operates between countries and so where we are reliant ... on exports from the U.S. we need to make sure that we understand the risks," she said, adding that it's key to "have plans in place as an industry to be able to cope with that, should that eventuality happen, that we have the government really lobbying on our side to make sure that that is an unlikely risk to crystallize."
British firms’ reliance on American cloud service providers poses a particular risk, Rees said, with U.S. tech giants Amazon, Microsoft and Google dominating in the cloud computing space. She called on regulators to ensure the providers are adhering to legislation.
Any outage of these cloud providers could cause “significant disruption” for the financial services industry, Rees said, and Britain should “ensure that we hold those technologies to the same standards as we would any other critical infrastructure here in the U.K.”
A bug in automation software took down Amazon Web Services, the largest cloud provider in the world, in October last year, causing outages for thousands of sites and applications.
Last month, MPs criticized the government for not acting decisively enough on cloud service providers.
New rules for “critical third parties” — firms, such as cloud providers, whose disruption could impact Britain’s financial stability — came into effect in Jan. 2025. They give the U.K.'s City regulators new powers of investigation and enforcement over providers designated as critical.
Despite the regime being in place for a year, no providers have been handed the designation. MPs on the Treasury Committee queried why the government “has been so slow to use the new powers at its disposal.”
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