A coalition of top European financial institutions has been formed to develop common security standards and best practices for the use of cloud technology in the EU.

The European Cloud User Coalition (ECUC) has been established by Allied Irish Banks, BAWAG Group., Belfius Bank, Commerzbank, Deutsche Börse, EFG Bank, Erste Group Bank, Euroclear, ING, KBC Bank, Swedbank and UniCredit.Private clouds have been widely used throughout the banking industry, however public cloud platform are becoming increasingly important due to their flexibility and scalability, as well as high-quality security and resilience standards.

Hopwever, the reliance of EU banks on third party clouds provided by a limited number of US entitites has recently become a focus of regulatory attention at the European Central Bank, which has bemoaned the absence of an EU challenger capable of taking on the might of Big Tech cloud providers from the overseas.

Besides winning new members ECUCs objective is to jointly agree on EU-grade security standards and best practices for the use of cloud technology and to use their collective muscle to enforce such standards on non-European cloud players.

“This coalition enables ING to adopt a hybrid cloud setup for analytics and AI, that brings us up to par with the fintechs and bigtechs of this world, says Kerem Tomak, chief analytics officer and initiative lead at ING. “It allows us to improve our digital capabilities and offer customers better, faster and more personalised experiences.”

As a first step, ECUC will publish a paper with requirements for cloud services during 2021. The paper will consider all aspects of the basic European regulation and the data localisation provision, including General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) requirements.

Source: ECUC