JPMorgan Chase will add to a $1.5 trillion investment plan designed to strengthen the US economic recovery across Europe, the Wall Street giant said on Tuesday.
The 10-year Security and Resiliency Initiative (SRI) was launched in the US last October with the aim of facilitating, financing and investing in industries deemed important to the security and stability of the US economy.
It was announced in November that the UK would be brought into the program, which focuses on several key areas, including supply chains and manufacturing, defense and aerospace, energy independence, healthcare, and strategic technologies such as AI.
Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, said in a statement on Tuesday that the US and Europe have long relied on “unexpected sources of things like precious minerals that are critical to collective security and prosperity.”
“Now, it is in our best interest to face these challenges together – because our security, freedom and economic growth depend on it,” he said.
The main pillars of SRI are divided into almost 30 sectors, from shipbuilding to spaceships, nuclear power, cybersecurity and the production of high-speed projectiles.
European aerospace and defense has seen significant investment in recent years, with regional leaders and the NATO military alliance committing to pooling spending on security.
The pledges are expected to boost European firms, as companies headquartered in the region are already reporting record backlogs and huge increases in revenue over the past year.
By 2025, the Stoxx Europe Aerospace and Defense index – home to the continent’s largest defense companies, including Airbus, Rolls-Royce again Rheinmetall – increased by 56.5%, with other defense district players more than double the amount.
So far this year, the index has gained 4.3%.
Chuka Umunna, the former British parliamentarian who will lead JPMorgan’s SRI program in the UK, told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe” on Tuesday that the bank’s power is “built on the power of the US”.
“US power has three pillars to it: military power, economic power and the power of its alliances,” he said. “And one thing that has become very clear is that the US and the West rely heavily on unreliable and unpredictable supply chains and sources of those things that are essential to national economic security and stability.”
Umunna said that in Europe, there will be five important countries that SRI will focus on – UK, France, Germany, Poland and Italy. But, he added, all EU and NATO member states will be included in the plan.
In his 2026 letter to shareholders of JPMorgan Chase, sent earlier this month, Dimon said that the US has allowed itself to become too dependent on unreliable sources of materials important to national security, such as precious minerals, semiconductors and advanced manufacturing.
“This is us putting our money where our mouth is,” Umunna said of SRI’s banking plan. “Unless you start investing and looking to develop our capabilities here in the West in these particular markets, we will continue to have the exposure we have.”
He pointed to energy, where the UK imports more than 40% of its energy needs, and semiconductors, where Umunna says the West relies heavily on East Asian economies for supplies.
“These are all things that we’re going to need to grow and build capacity on,” he told CNBC. “We’re bringing this through traditional global banking products that we would use, but when you have an SRI-aligned company, we’re going to want to lean more. For example, from a credit perspective, you might see JPMorgan doing smaller deals, if it’s in this space, than you would otherwise expect.”
