Year after year, the great and the good of the world’s business, private associations, and political leaders spend fortunes for the privilege of attending this conclave to see and hear what is on the minds of their peers. After the year-end slowdown, Davos offers a good start to January, a way to stretch the mind with some serious networking and conversation. This year, as in the past, I observed Davos from a distance while attending the Asian Financial Forum in Hong Kong.
The 2026 Forum proved somewhat “unexpectedly” stimulating, given the politics. But since when is careful thinking about hard questions a bad thing for business leaders like World Alliance members and newsletter readers?
At a time of evident change in the world order, the striking, practical address was made by Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, who duly received one of three standing ovations at the end, an honor reserved only to Nelson Mandela and Volodymyr Zelenskyy since the first Forum program in 1971. What was so striking in his remarks, and how can international financial centers (IFCs) benefit from his message?
As the Prime Minister views the world, the way to adapt to and benefit from changing political alignments is to be agile and pragmatic in building a range of ties with like-minded partners worldwide. This instruction on how IFCs might interact through the Alliance’s structure is the essence of the World Alliance's purpose.
IFCs are not state actors, and neither are their members. But the total financial weight of a nation’s savings and investment system is an essential element for government sovereignty – the work of members is fundamental for their governments and societies. A robust financial system matters.
One part of Carney’s address is applicable to our Alliance and supports its basic purpose: “Collective investments in resilience are cheaper than everyone building their own fortresses. Shared standards reduce fragmentation. Complementarities are positive sum.”
In an echo to the Carney address, it is a curious accident that the World Alliance has no members in the United States, though it is not for lack of searching since the Alliance’s founding. The Greenwich alternative finance hub maintains its observer status, alongside the Financial and International Business Association in Miami. IFCs in the US are not ignoring or avoiding the World Alliance for whatever reason; there simply is no agency in the US that actively promotes the breadth of financial services available in their city. There is no entity that corresponds to what Alliance members do in many other parts of the world.
The Alliance network of IFCs can and must work productively together for its members, very much as Carney suggests. There are complementarities, there are benefits, and some collective work is cheaper when costs are shared across the membership. There is value in participating in studies, surveys, event sharing, and meetings – and in getting individual members' work out to the world via World Alliance media as a boost to their own communications efforts.
For decades since its founding, the World Economic Forum’s goal of transnational collaboration has been worth supporting, and it aligns with our institutional framework at the World Alliance. In the years ahead, this will occur in new ways. I welcome this adaptation.
For reference, before global politics overshadowed the basic work of the conference, the World Economic Forum had asked delegates to have in mind five key themes:
- How can we cooperate in a more contested world?
- How can we unlock new sources of growth?
- How can we better invest in people?
- How can we deploy innovation at scale and responsibly?
- How can we build prosperity within planetary boundaries? (To be clear, this last point refers to care for the resource limitations of the earth under stress.)