Amazon, Google and other tech companies providing cloud computing to banks in Britain may have to comply with minimum resilience standards and testing, a senior Bank of England official said on Monday.
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The BoE, along with regulators in Europe and the United States, is worried about the reliance of banks on a handful of Big Tech firms for cloud computing in increasingly critical banking services, and the impact an outage at one of them could have on financial stability.
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"This is a big topic both within the UK and internationally," Victoria Saporta, BoE executive director for prudential supervision, told an event held by the Institute of International Finance, a global banking industry body.
A global approach would be best, she said.
"Our current thinking is that the most effective ... approach to managing these risks from critical third party services providers is through a combination of minimum resilience standards aimed directly at critical third parties ... coupled with resilience testing of these critical third parties," Saporta said.
