Team

Stephen
Adams

Senior Director
Image
""

Stephen is a Senior Director at Global Counsel. Over the last twenty years, Stephen has worked as a policy adviser on international trade and the EU single market in the European Parliament, as an advisor in DG Trade in the European Commission and an adviser to the British Secretary of State for Business. He was also an Executive Director at Goldman Sachs in London, where he worked on political risk in cross border M&A and supply chain design. Stephen is an Honorary Senior Research Associate in the School of Politics at University College London, where he lectures on contemporary aspects of public-policymaking, international trade policy and trade and investment politics.

At Global Counsel he chiefly supports the trade, investment and financial services policy practices, with a focus on industrial and trade policy, supply chain design and corporate internationalisation. He works with senior leaders in many GC clients to deepen and develop their engagement with public policymaking.

Recent examples of his work include:

  • Advising companies across multiple sectors on supply chain resilience after Brexit, with focus in areas such as customs processing, rules of origin and client novation in financial services.
  • Collaborating with a major UK Trade Association to produce a review of UK trade policy for the financial services sector and recommendations for the UK and other governments on how to design a trade policy for financial services. 
  • Providing expert training for the UK FCO and DIT in a number of trade policy sub-fields including services trade, IP rights in trade policy and level playing field provisions in trade law.

Stephen Adams is one of the UK’s leading providers of specialist training on trade policy for both public policymakers and trading companies. Learn more about his trade policy training.

Latest Insights by Stephen Adams

Financial services icon

The IRA and GDIP: Much more than just a subsidy war

Financial Services

The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) has fired the starting gun on what is likely to be a new era of industrial policy around the green transition and, set alongside the CHIPS Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, marks a wide shift in US policy. It has also triggered an anxious response from the EU with the Green Deal Industrial Plan (GDIP), and although they are often…

Read more
Financial services icon

How will EU-UK normalisation impact financial services trade?

Financial Services

The agreement of the Windsor Framework on the Northern Ireland protocol is an important step towards ‘normalisation’ of relations between the EU and the UK. One immediate consequence has been speculation that the EU and the UK may disinter and sign the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) on cooperation in financial services that stalled in mid-2021. While normalisation is…

Read more
Financial services icon

Could Central Bank Digital Currencies change the way we pay for trade?

Financial Services

The growing debate around Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) has begun to focus increasingly on the question of cross-border payments. A number of pilots around the world have begun to test the practical questions of whether CBDCs can improve global trade invoicing. These discussions and the review of pilots have generally been confined to CBDC specialists and a…

Read more

View all Insights by Stephen Adams