Prime Minister Mark Carney and his wife, Diana Fox Carney, arrive on Tuesday for the NATO Summit in Ankara, Turkey, where backers of the new global defence bank were announced.Muhammed Abdullah Kurtar/The Canadian Press
Nine countries are now supporting a new Canada-led multinational defence bank. But major partners such as Germany or Britain are still absent, with the latter suggesting instead that Canada merge the bank with its own parallel initiative.
The Defence, Security and Resilience Bank, or DSRB, is a financial institution being established by a collective of countries that includes NATO members and their Indo-Pacific allies.
Albania, Belgium, Greece, Latvia, Turkey and Ukraine announced their support for the DSRB at the NATO summit in Turkey on Tuesday. They join Canada, Luxembourg and Romania – countries that previously declared their interest – in formally establishing the institution, which aims to provide long-term, low-cost financing for defence projects by its member countries.
“We commit to providing the leadership required to advance the creation of the DSRB with the urgency demanded by the current geopolitical context, to enable the Bank to commence operations as early as 2027,” the leaders of the nine countries said in a jointly written statement.
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Countries all over the world are working to increase their defence spending and build up their industrial bases, spurred by rising geopolitical tension and pressure from the United States to become less reliant on it as a major military power. NATO allies, more specifically, have committed to increasing their defence spending to 5 per cent of GDP by 2035.
The Globe and Mail first reported in April that Canada had been chosen as the host country for the bank, meaning its headquarters will land in the country. Since then, Prime Minister Mark Carney has been heavily campaigning for the institution and its benefits in meetings with other world leaders.
He’s been successful, to some extent, given that the bank now has several European countries on board, including Luxembourg, which is known for its financial sector. But other major powers, such as Germany and Britain, remain absent from the list of founding countries, provoking questions about whether the bank can truly scale to the size of similar institutions, such as the World Bank or the European Investment Bank.
On Tuesday, Bloomberg reported that Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves spoke in Turkey about merging the DSRB with her country’s Multilateral Defence Mechanism, a financing model that places an emphasis on procurement and stockpiling arms. Britain, the Netherlands, Finland and Poland have signed on to develop the initiative thus far, with a similar goal of setting it up by 2027.
Britain was an observer during April negotiations in Montreal to establish the DSRB’s charter, but remains absent from the group of countries working to set up the bank.
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Germany was also present as an observer at negotiations this spring, but is yet to formally announce its support. In the meantime, it has received calls from its national defence industry association, as well as Wolfgang Ischinger, chair of the Munich Security Conference and a member of the DSRB development group’s board, to join the bank, citing a need to co-operate with its allies and not lose out on defence contracts.
Canada’s federal government has said the defence bank is being set up to complement – not compete with or duplicate – other defence financing institutions such as Britain’s Multilateral Defence Mechanism or the European Union’s Security Action for Europe program. But without a critical mass of members, it’s difficult to tell which countries will see the need to join the DSRB if other tools are available to them.
Initially, the bank’s development group said it could include as many as 40 countries, all NATO members and their allies. But despite having 19 countries present at the spring negotiations, only nine are moving forward as founding members, for now.
These countries will get to work defining the bank’s policies and directives so it can deliver what it has promised: affordable capital, loans and job creation for its member countries, and in particular, the small- to medium-sized businesses that operate in their defence sectors.
As it stands, the collective gross domestic product of the nine countries who are establishing the bank, including Canada, is about US$5.75-trillion, according to 2025 data from the World Bank Group. That’s nearly equal to the GDP of Germany alone in 2025, which was about US$5.05-trillion.
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John Fragos, press secretary for Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne, said Tuesday’s news is a first step toward continuing to establish the bank, one that will inform further decisions, including the location of the headquarters within Canada.
“Canada is proceeding with pace and purpose, developing Articles of Agreement, and working with allies and partners alike to form a group of founding nations and expand member participation,” he said in a written statement, adding that more countries are welcome to join at any point.
A decision on which Canadian city will host the bank is not expected to be made at the summit in Turkey but should come some time in the following months, given the goal to establish the bank by 2027.
Next, the federal government said in a press release that it invites its partner countries to “undertake their respective domestic treaty processes” in order to move the bank toward becoming operational.