Beau urges banks to curb dependence on technology providers
Denis Beau, First Deputy Governor of the Bank of France, urged financial institutions to retain control over critical digital infrastructure. Speaking at a Paris seminar, he advocated dependency inventories, exit options and European technology capabilities.
Concentration carries a cost
Beau warned that reliance on hyperscalers creates concentration risk, erodes internal expertise and enables vendor lock-in through higher costs and unwanted bundled services.
A 2025 CIGREF study, extrapolating from six large companies, estimated European spending on US software and cloud services at €264 billion annually.
The July 2024 CrowdStrike update disabled 8.5 million computers worldwide.
Frontier AI can identify vulnerabilities and generate patches, but broad system access creates compromise and data-transfer risks.
Beau urged inventories of critical IT dependencies, supported by the Digital Resilience Index, alongside multi-cloud or hybrid-cloud strategies, portable data and applications, exit options and open-source tools.
Rules need technological capacity
Beau defended the GDPR and AI Act as supports for sovereignty.
The European Commission's proposed Cloud & AI Development Act includes a cloud sovereignty classification; its package also promotes open source.
DORA strengthens resilience testing, incident monitoring and oversight of critical providers.
The Bank of France and Prudential Supervision and Resolution Authority (ACPR) renewed cooperation with ANSSI in July 2026.
An ACPR plan sent to industry associations in June prioritises cyber hygiene and faster patching as attackers exploit vulnerabilities more rapidly.
Control begins at home
The Bank of France ties its digital sovereignty doctrine to its 2028 roadmap: control of data, infrastructure and skills.
Its projects include Mistral AI on a sovereign cloud and open-source private-cloud virtualisation.
It is also exploring collective measures within the Eurosystem to mitigate major supplier risks.