When Power and Profit Collide: Geoeconomics Comes to the Boardroom

The financial services sector must take geoeconomics seriously, according to Jens Hillebrand Pohl of the Helsinki Geoeconomics School. Pohl joined Dr Chris Buttigieg, moderator and Malta Financial Services Authority (MFSA) Chief Officer Supervision, for a fireside chat on geopolitics and geoeconomics in financial services at the Governance, Risk, Compliance (GRC) and ESG Conference.

“We are living through a period of increased consciousness about power politics in the economic domain,” Pohl told delegates, defining geoeconomics as fundamentally “the study of economic influence,” a discipline concerned with who wins, who loses, and why.

Pohl traced the current era of geoeconomic coercion to a gradual exhaustion of the rewards-based toolkit that shaped the post-Cold War order. Sanctions, punitive tariffs, and trade restrictions have replaced the inducements, market liberalisation, and capital integration that once dominated the policy landscape. “The boundary between power and profit is blurring,” he said, “and there are winners and losers in what's happening.”

Responding to questions on technology dependency, Pohl identified two critical vulnerabilities for Europe: energy and advanced technology. Cloud computing and AI leave the continent acutely reliant on US providers, raising uncomfortable questions about resilience. He urged audiences to engage in what he called “risk imagination”: envisaging scenarios from an outright kill switch to subtler disruptions such as prohibitive cost increases. “The dilemma is between security and resilience on the one hand, and efficiency on the other,” he acknowledged, conceding that weaning Europe off US technology remains a distant prospect.

For regulators, Pohl's message was direct: resist the temptation to treat current tensions as an aberration. “We have to fight the narrative that what we are experiencing with Trump is an aberration,” he warned. Supervisors, he argued, should invest in scenario construction, support their sectors in building long-term resilience, and “ensure there is a basic minimum standard of awareness of geoeconomics risk in the jurisdiction.” The work, he stressed, must start now.