Dutch watchdogs urge Europe’s banks to pool buying power against US tech giants
A single European bank haggling with Amazon or Microsoft has almost no leverage. A few hundred of them haggling together might. That, stripped to its essence, is the recommendation Dutch regulators handed their government on Friday, in a report warning that Europe’s reliance on American technology is deepening rather than easing.
The proposals came from a group of Dutch watchdogs that includes De Nederlandsche Bank, the country’s central bank, and its data protection authority.
Their central suggestion is blunt: banks and finance firms should combine their buying power so they are not picked off one by one in negotiations with US tech giants, according to Bloomberg, which reported the document.
The warning underneath it is that digital dependencies on overseas companies “continue to grow” among the institutions the regulators supervise, despite years of European rhetoric about strategic autonomy. That gap between the policy ambition and the day-to-day procurement reality...
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