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The chief executive of a large European asset manager received an unusual if chunky task from his board recently: how to de-Americanify the company.
The request is nothing if not a sign of the times as US President Donald Trump’s aggressive tariffs unsettle markets and businesses alike. However, this arrived weeks before the so-called “liberation day”. Trump’s belligerence towards Greenland and Ukraine had already caused many European companies to question links and ties that have bound them to the US for decades.
The asset manager will look at everything from custody banks to cloud service providers. The goal is not to decouple from the US, but to look at what kind of potential risks it has and how best to mitigate them.
“We are now discussing things that even a few months ago I would have said were beyond the realm of fantasy. We all don’t want this world to end, but it seems entirely prudent to stress test things and make sure we at least have alternatives to America,” says one leading European director who has experienced similar board discussions.
To be clear, nobody is suggesting a sudden break. Too many companies, industries and supply chains are intertwined to do much more than pray the worst-case scenario does not come to pass. Especially in technology, the US is hard to avoid in any meaningful way. In many cases, the only alternative — China — might be even more problematic.
But the concern in European boardrooms is real, and has been growing for years, even without Trump. In the financial industry, there have long been deep worries about how the US has imposed large, often billion-dollar, fines against European banks for illegal activities that have little if nothing to do with the US.
Danske Bank paid $1.4bn in 2022 to the US for money laundering failings in its Estonian branch; Standard Chartered was fined $1.1bn in 2019 for sanctions breaches with, among others, Iran; BNP Paribas also had to pay $9bn in 2014 for breaching sanctions.
“This kind of fine has caused a lot of consternation. There’s a feeling that the US has singled out European institutions, and it seems sensible to see if there’s a way to avoid this in the future,” says one European financial executive, while conceding that breaking the link with the dollar — which caused the probes and fines — is all but impossible.
For most European companies, de-Americanifying themselves may be a stretch too far. But making themselves more European and resilient would not be.
“It’s not about de-Americanifying; it’s about strengthening Europe. There is so much that we have in our control that is not dependent on people on the other side of the globe — such as deregulation, strengthening our capital markets, thinking about tax, pensions,” says Jan-Olof Jacke, the former AstraZeneca chief executive who now heads the Confederation of Swedish Enterprise.
It is a logic that is perhaps most apparent at the moment in the defence industry where “Buy European” is on the minds of many, causing a divergence in share performance between American and European groups. But the impact of US tariffs on well-established supply chains is rippling through more and more industries.
“The lack of predictability might cause a backlash against the US. Many are assessing what their exposure is to the US,” says an executive at a US financial group. Or as French President Emmanuel Macron said last week: “What message would we send by having major European players investing billions of euros in the American economy at a time when [the US is] hitting us?”
Still, there are limits to this pro-Europe sentiment. For tech start-ups, the US remains the lodestar with many of Europe’s brightest prospects from Spotify to Klarna seeking listings across the Atlantic. “I don’t see any alternative to the US on so many different levels from capital to the size of the market,” says one serial European tech entrepreneur. There is a general lack of risk capital in Europe, but some executives hope that the tariff shock could lead to flows from the US coming back home.
So don’t expect many public announcements of de-Americanification any time soon. But there is likely to be plenty of behind closed-doors examination going on. As Jacke says: “A single man on the other side of the Atlantic decides what we talk about. It is hugely frustrating.”
richard.milne@ft.com
