Risk & Resilience

European insurers and occupational pension funds entered 2026 from a position most financial regulators would envy. Markets lurched in response to geopolitical shocks. Trade relationships continued to shift. Investors repriced risk. Yet the core indicators supervisors watch most closely (capital, liquidity and solvency) held up remarkably well. That is what the European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority's latest Financial Stability Report, published Wednesday. It is also, in many ways, the easy part of the story.

Organizations around the world woke up on June 12 to discover that a capability available the day before was suddenly gone. Anthropic's Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models, among the company's most advanced artificial intelligence systems, were reportedly taken offline following a U.S. government directive requiring access to be restricted to American citizens. Because verifying every user's nationality in real time was not practically feasible, Anthropic reportedly responded by shutting down access altogether. The decision affected users far beyond the United States, including organizations in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. According to multiple reports, it also cut off access for the UK's AI Security Institute while it was actively evaluating the systems.

Europe's banks are making money, lending is growing, bad loans remain near historic lows and capital ratios sit close to record highs. That is the easy part of the European Banking Authority's latest assessment of the sector. The harder part is explaining why a report that contains so many reassuring numbers reads, at times, like a warning.

A recurring theme runs through the Dutch Authority for the Financial Markets' 2025 SREP Market Overview. Firms have spent considerable effort building policies, documenting processes and establishing governance structures. The harder part is making sure those things function as intended once they leave the page.

Australia's financial institutions are not sufficiently prepared for the operational and financial consequences of geopolitical disruption, according to a warning issued Wednesday by the country's prudential regulator. The Australian Prudential Regulation Authority has written to banks, insurers and superannuation funds outlining what it calls minimum expectations for readiness against geopolitical shocks, citing concerns that many firms have yet to translate growing awareness of geopolitical risks into practical risk management and crisis preparedness.

The European Banking Authority spent much of last year preparing to oversee companies that are not banks. That may sound like an administrative detail, but it isn't. For most of its existence, the EBA's job was largely to write rules, refine standards and help build the regulatory architecture that emerged after the global financial crisis. The institution became one of the principal architects of Europe's banking framework, translating political agreements into thousands of pages of technical requirements.

The first paper I wrote as an analyst at Forrester back in 2013 was about mitigating risk in the customer journey. That was also my first exposure to marketing’s alternative vocabulary for risk they call it customer pain points or challenges. I call it risk. Same thing, different outfit.