Dutch regulator okays Amazon Web Services for financial sector
DNB recently approved Amazon Web Services for use by the Dutch financial sector
De Nederlandsche Bank (DNB), the Netherlands’ national banking regulator, has cleared Amazon Web Services for use in the country’s financial sector, clarifying key supervision criteria for Dutch organisations looking to move infrastructure or services to the AWS cloud.
The DNB’s announcement means Dutch banks and other financial institutions have been given the “all-clear” to use AWS for a range of services including websites, mobile applications, retail banking platforms, high performance computing and credit risk analysis solutions.
“This announcement comes at a time when cloud computing is starting to transform the financial services sector,” said Steve Midgley, Head of EMEA – Amazon Web Services, Amazon. “This adds to other initiatives, such as the NASDAQ FinQloud, that are specifically designed to help financial services businesses to innovate, with faster time to market, and reduced capital expenditure on technology resources while maintaining high levels of reliability and security. Due to the DNB’s efforts, Dutch financial organisations can now enjoy the benefits of cloud computing thus creating efficiency in the sector. ”
The DNB’s approval extends not just to data hosted directly in AWS datacentres, but also includes applications and services built and delivered by third party vendors on the AWS platform.
“As a Dutch company specialising in core banking technology for the financial sector we have chosen AWS to run our ‘bank-out-of-the-box’ SaaS solution,” said Chris Zadeh, chief executive officer of Dutch banking technology firm Ohpen.
While the certain pockets of the financial sector – particularly banks – have traditionally looked at public clouds rather conservatively, many are now turning a corner and moving past large-scale virtualisation and private cloud implementations and looking for cheaper commodity-based public cloud services.
“Large Dutch banks are already moving their entire retail banking platforms to the cloud using Ohpen core banking technology running on top of AWS,” Zadeh said.
