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.”