By Elizabeth Howcroft
PARIS (Reuters) -European Union regulators on Tuesday designated 19 technology companies, including Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft, as critical third-party computing providers for the bloc’s finance industry.
Under the EU’s Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA), which started being applied in January 2025, three EU-level financial regulators can together name certain technology providers as critical and supervise them directly.
The new rules are part of an attempt to protect the EU’s financial sector from the risks around its reliance on external technology providers, for example its use of cloud computing to run key banking services. Regulators are worried about the impact on the financial sector if a tech provider used by many banks had an outage.
The companies named by the European Banking Authority, European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority, and European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA), include the European arms of Amazon Web Services, Bloomberg, Google Cloud, IBM, London Stock Exchange Group , Microsoft, Orange and Tata Consultancy Services .
The regulators will examine whether these companies have the right risk management and governance frameworks in place to ensure the services they provide will remain resilient, they said in a press release on ESMA’s website.
A spokesperson for LSEG said they welcomed the designation, and Google Cloud said the same on its website.
A Microsoft spokesperson said the company was committed to complying with Europe’s cybersecurity and resilience laws. A spokesperson for Amazon Web Services said it had been preparing for the designation and would continue engaging with the relevant authorities.
Bloomberg, IBM, Orange and Tata did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
European officials’ concerns about their finance industry’s resilience have risen this year. The European Central Bank on Tuesday cited geopolitical tensions and technological disruptions as among the risks facing Europe’s banking sector.
The UK has rolled out a similar regime, though no firms have yet been named. Regulators have advised Britain’s finance ministry on candidates, and a government minister told lawmakers earlier this month she expected designations by this time next year.
(Reporting by Elizabeth Howcroft; Additional reporting by Phoebe Seers; Editing by Tommy Reggiori Wilkes and Richard Chang)
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