Türkiye has informed Canada that it will join the new Defence, Security and Resilience Bank (DSRB) as a founding member, a Turkish official told Reuters on 13 July 2026 – reversing a position announced days earlier to withhold its commitment.
The official said Ankara had notified Ottawa of its participation without explaining what prompted the change, in what the report described as the third stance Türkiye has taken on the bank since it was unveiled the previous week.
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The DSRB was launched at the 2026 NATO Summit in Ankara, where Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney welcomed support for the Canada-led institution from Albania, Belgium, Greece, Latvia, Luxembourg, Romania, Türkiye and Ukraine on 7 July. In a joint declaration, the nine leaders – including Canada – announced their shared intention to establish the bank and to mobilize public and private capital at scale to support defence, security and resilience priorities.
The institution is designed to provide long-term, low-cost financing for defence, security and resilience initiatives across supply chains, helping small- and medium-sized enterprises and member governments address critical financing gaps. By drawing on a strong credit foundation, the bank is intended to expand access to capital, reduce financing costs and support the expansion of industrial capacity across member countries.
The concept was first proposed in 2025 by Rob Murray, who previously led the creation of NATO’s Defence Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic and the NATO Innovation Fund, and drew early backing from financial institutions including JPMorgan Chase, Deutsche Bank, ING and Commerzbank. The design borrows from established multilateral lenders, using a shared capital base and a strong credit rating to raise financing on favourable terms for members.
Canada has positioned itself at the centre of the effort. In-person negotiations among representatives from eighteen countries began in Montréal in March 2026, and concluded in April with agreement on the DSRB’s founding Articles of Agreement, during which participating states unanimously selected Canada to host the bank’s future headquarters. The Business Development Bank of Canada’s president and chief executive, Isabelle Hudon, is Canada’s lead negotiator for the institution.
Türkiye’s participation carries weight given its scale as a defence producer and its role as summit host, and its confirmation keeps it among the group entrusted with defining the bank’s initial policies and directives. The founding members have committed to advancing the bank with the aim of commencing operations as early as 2027, with Canada inviting partners to undertake their respective domestic treaty processes.
Ottawa has framed the DSRB as complementing, not duplicating existing national and multilateral instruments that support defence production. The initiative follows a February roundtable at which Canada’s finance minister, François-Philippe Champagne, and defence minister, David McGuinty, met the country’s leading financial institutions and signalled public backing for the effort.
Canada, which reached NATO’s two per cent of GDP spending target this fiscal year and is on a pathway toward the alliance’s five per cent pledge by 2035, has treated the bank as one element of a broader defence-industrial push. Türkiye’s confirmation adds one of NATO’s largest arms exporters to a Canadian-led institution that Ottawa is pursuing as a central instrument for accelerating Canadian access to emerging and key overseas defence markets.
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