Rebecca Harding
Trade has stopped behaving like trade. Sanctions, export controls, dual-use technology rules and supply chain reshoring now sit on the agenda of boards that were built for a globalised market. Most leadership teams cannot tell, in operational terms, what economic security means for their capital plans, their supplier base, or their next ten years of growth.
Rebecca Harding is a trade economist who helps boards and policymakers read the new geoeconomic landscape and translate economic security into capital, supply chain and trade finance decisions.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Rebecca Harding
- A working command of the machinery of trade finance and trade data, built through founding Coriolis Technologies and serving as Chief Economist at UK Finance, that few geopolitics speakers can match.
- The author of The World at Economic War, selected by Martin Wolf in his Financial Times best economics books of 2025, with a defined argument about how the market system itself has become a tool of great-power conflict.
- A current operating role: CEO of the Centre for Economic Security and Chief Economic Adviser to the Defence, Security and Resilience Bank Development Group, which puts her inside the institutions building the new trade and security architecture.
- Equally credible in a C-suite keynote, a regulator-level workshop, or a wargaming session, having designed formats for finance, defence and policy audiences.
- A specific point of view on sustainable trade and digitalisation, grounded in advisory work with banks, corporates and parliamentary committees rather than in commentary alone.
Biography highlights
- CEO, Centre for Economic Security, leading research on economic threats, supply chain resilience and the weaponisation of trade.
- Chief Economic Adviser, Defence, Security and Resilience Bank Development Group.
- Founder and former CEO of Coriolis Technologies, a trade data and analytics business serving the trade finance sector, acquired by TradeSun.
- Author of The World at Economic War (2025) and co-author of The Weaponization of Trade (2017), published by London Publishing Partnership.
- Former Chief Economist at UK Finance, Chief Economist at the Work Foundation, Head of Corporate Research at Deloitte, and Senior Fellow at London Business School.
- Regular contributor to BBC, Bloomberg, Sky News, CNBC, BBC Radio 4 and Times Radio on trade and economic security.
Biography
Trade is now a security question. Sanctions regimes, export controls, the digitalisation of payments and the contest over critical minerals have collapsed the old boundary between commercial trade policy and national security. Boards and finance ministries are trying to make capital, supplier and counterparty decisions inside a system whose rules are being rewritten in real time.
Rebecca Harding’s career has been built on this seam. She is CEO of the Centre for Economic Security and Chief Economic Adviser to the Defence, Security and Resilience Bank Development Group, two institutions designed for exactly this terrain. Earlier she founded Coriolis Technologies, a trade data and analytics business that gave the trade finance sector a clearer view of risk in cross-border flows, and served as Chief Economist at UK Finance, Chief Economist at the Work Foundation, Head of Corporate Research at Deloitte, and Senior Fellow at London Business School.
Her argument is set out in The World at Economic War: How to Rebuild Security in a Weaponized Global Economy, published in 2025 and selected by Martin Wolf in the Financial Times among his best economics books of the year. The thesis, developed from her earlier book The Weaponization of Trade with Jack Harding, is that the market system itself has become a means of great-power competition, and that defence, finance and trade can no longer be governed as separate domains.
For senior audiences this matters because the operational consequences are concrete. They show up in supplier dependencies, in sanctions exposure, in the cost and direction of trade finance, and in where capital can credibly be deployed for the next decade. Harding works through those questions with banks, corporates, regulators and parliamentary committees, and her keynotes, panels and wargaming sessions are designed to leave decision-makers with a clearer read of what economic security requires of them.
Key speaking topics
- Economic security and the weaponisation of trade
- Geopolitics and geoeconomics
- Trade finance and supply chain finance
- Supply chain resilience and reshoring
- Digital and sustainable trade
- Defence and security finance
- Macroeconomic outlook and global markets
Ideal for
- Boards and executive committees of banks, insurers and large corporates with cross-border exposure
- Heads of trade finance, treasury, supply chain and procurement
- Policy, regulatory and public affairs leaders working on sanctions, export controls and economic security
- Defence, security and resilience investors and the institutions financing them
Audience outcomes
- A clearer working definition of economic security and what it asks of capital allocation, supplier strategy and trade finance
- A read on how sanctions, export controls and reshoring are reshaping cross-border risk for specific sectors
- A framework for separating geopolitical noise from the structural shifts that change long-range plans
- A view of where digital and sustainable trade infrastructure is heading, and the implications for banks and corporates
- Questions and pressure tests that a leadership team can take straight into its strategy and risk discussions