Geopolitics Tops Bank Risk Lists as Macro Takes a Back Seat

A new report from FIS finds geopolitics has overtaken macroeconomics as banks’ top threat, forcing a rethink of risk appetite and scenario playbook.

FIS - a global financial technology company whose Balance Sheet Management platform integrates data, models and processes across capital, liquidity and earnings - commissioned CeFPro to produce The State of Systemic Risk: How Financial Institutions are Reframing the Threat Landscape (September 2025), a global CeFPro report on how banks are adapting to a more volatile world.

In the report, FIS finds that geopolitical instability now outranks traditional macroeconomic pressures, reshaping priorities, operating assumptions and the speed at which risk appetite must adjust.

According to FIS, nearly half of surveyed risk leaders (49%) cite geopolitics as the most pressing near- to medium-term threat, ahead of macroeconomic risk at 32%.

That reordering reflects the cascade effects of conflicts, trade realignments and supply-chain disruptions that bleed into funding costs, liquidity, asset quality and earnings.

FIS concludes that the ‘polycrisis’ era has made single-factor planning obsolete and raised the bar for cross-risk coordination.

The shift is not uniform across regions. FIS reports that Europe (69%) and Asia Pacific (57%) rank geopolitics first, while the Americas remain marginally more concerned about macroeconomic conditions (42%) than geopolitics (40%). FIS interprets these splits as a function of direct exposure to geopolitical shocks, regulatory maturity and the degree to which legacy systems constrain agility when conditions change quickly.