The Netherlands’ chief financial regulator, has warned that Artificial Intelligence adoption will heighten systemic risks for European banks due to their dependence on foreign technology giants.

The Chair of Supervision at the Dutch National Bank, Steven Maijoor, made this disclosure on Monday calling for urgent steps to curb those vulnerabilities, according to Bloomberg.

“There is urgency to this matter,” Maijoor, said in an interview. “If you use more AI, there is also increased reliance on parties outside of Europe.”

The United States hosts the biggest cloud-service providers, Microsoft, Amazon and Alphabet — on which banks rely for much of their core infrastructure, as well as leading AI firms like OpenAI and Nvidia.

Maijoor argues that, over time, the EU must build its own alternatives to limit risks such as outages that could disrupt payment systems or steep price hikes that could undermine European banks’ competitiveness.

A recent report by the DNB and the Dutch markets regulator underscored the sector’s heavy reliance on foreign tech providers.

Maijoor said this will trigger a “discussion at the European level” on how financial regulators can tackle the resulting risks.

He added that the EU’s push to strengthen its capital markets could ease dependence on the US by providing better backing for start-ups.

Procurement policies that treat the sovereignty of tech suppliers as a risk factor, and favour the greater assurance of service continuity offered by European providers, could also help.

“This is an area where we do not need to convince the financial sector that there is an issue,” Maijoor said, adding that firms were also motivated to act because they know they risk becoming “locked in” with key vendors, which can lead to higher prices.