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Netherlands: Dutch Central Bank (DNB) goes to Lidl for cloud services

Discount Retail Chain Lidl's sister company Schwarz Digits signs a major contract as a supplier of IT services to the Dutch Central Bank (DNB).


This was announced by sales director Bernd Wagner on Monday during a major industrial fair in Hanover. Schwarz Gruppe presents itself as the reliable European alternative to American hyperscalers such as Amazon, Microsoft and Google, now that relations with the United States have soured. Schwarz did not disclose more details. DNB was unable to respond at the beginning of the afternoon.


Last year, DNB and the Netherlands Authority for the Financial Markets (AFM) warned that the Dutch financial sector has made itself far too dependent on foreign, mostly American IT service providers and cloud providers. Recently, there has been concern about this, as the White House is no longer always friendly to Europe and the American government has far-reaching powers to view data on American servers, even if they are on servers outside the United States. For example, a prosecutor of the International Criminal Court in The Hague was previously cut off from his Microsoft mailbox by order of President Donald Trump. The ICC is now also switching to systems that are not American.


DNB dependent on US cloud

The regulator had to acknowledge in its warning that it is also largely dependent on American service providers for its digital infrastructure. However, DNB Director Steven Maijoor announced in October that he would "set a good example" and want to switch to a European cloud, although according to him it is "not yet as strong and of good quality as the one from the US".


Schwarz Digits is one of the few parties that, like the Americans, is investing billions in the construction of new huge data centers for cloud services and data centers that act as brains for artificial intelligence. Recently, the company announced an investment of euro 11 billion in a huge data center in Lübbenau. Together with other German parties such as Deutsche Telekom and SAP, it is working on alternative products for American IT services.


Alternative still difficult

In Schleswig-Holstein, the local government is already trying to move away from Microsoft's operating environment in favour of an open source alternative on a European model. However, this has not been without the necessary malfunctions and problems so far.


A DNB spokesperson said on Monday that it could not comment on individual contracts with suppliers, but confirmed "concerns about dependence on large non-European cloud suppliers," which according to DNB are "'understandable and shared'. That is why with every new step to the cloud, we explicitly look at geopolitical risks and investigate how we can reduce our dependency."



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