Velázquez, Porter urge FSOC to oversee tech giants

This story appeared in Bank Digest.                                   

Rep. Nydia M. Velázquez (D-NY) and Rep. Katie Porter (D-Calif) have written to the Treasury Secretary, as head of the Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC), encouraging the FSOC to consider designating the three leading cloud-based computing storage providers for the financial industry as systemically important financial market utilities (SIFMUs) in light of the data breach at Capital One Financial Corporation, which exposed the personal information of approximately 106 million Capital One credit card customers and applicants. The personal data of millions of Americans that Capital One was storing was being hosted in a cloud provided by Amazon Web Services, and was breached by a former Amazon employee. The letter calls on the FSOC to consider designating Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud as SIFMUs under the Title VIII of the Dodd-Frank Act. A SIFMU designation would subject the tech firms to enhanced oversight by the Federal Reserve Board to ensure a cloud failure of a leading financial institution would.