The European Central Bank (ECB), the reserve bank of the Eurozone, which is a monetary union of 19 EU member states which employ the Euro, has noted that there doesn’t seem to be an EU challenger that’s capable of matching the capabilities of Big Tech cloud providers from the United States.
In response to a recent European Commission (EC) consultation on digital financial services, the ECB noted:
“One important challenge in relation to digital finance will be to reassess the dependence of European financial service providers on non-EU providers of critical services and technical infrastructures (e.g. the ‘cloud’), while EU-based global players have struggled to emerge. This could lead to banks’ reliance on a few non-EU service providers and possible concentration issues at both entity and systemic levels.”
The ECB has been supporting the ongoing development of a European Union bank-backed initiative which will aim to compete with US payment card giants Mastercard and Visa. However, the EU may not be able to realistically compete when it comes to offering its own version of (equally capable) cloud-powered services.
