Adding a new twist to growing tensions over American tech influence in Europe, the Dutch government has moved to block US-based Kyndryl’s bid to acquire Solvinity, the Dutch IT company behind authentication app DigiD, among other things.
IT services giant Kyndryl announced in November an agreement to purchase Solvinity, which provides secure managed cloud services in the Netherlands.
“Kyndryl’s acquisition of Solvinity will enable us to offer customers expanded services in modernizing, innovating, and securing sensitive and complex workloads,” Petra Goude, president of Kyndryl strategic markets, said in a release at the time.
However, since DigiD enables Dutch citizens to authenticate themselves for financial, tax, healthcare, and governmental matters, the country’s government has now chosen to block the acquisition, citing that it would pose “a possible risk to the public interest,” according to a report from Politico.
According to Solvinity, DigiD is managed by Logius, a government organization that is part of the Netherlands’ Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations. Solvinity provides the infrastructure platform on which DigiD runs, and this platform is hosted in a government data center.
“The politicization of this process has overshadowed the clear and important benefits this transaction would have brought to Solvinity’s customers and Dutch citizens,” Kyndryl representatives said in a statement quoted by Politico.
As the gap between the US and Europe has widened, several EU countries have recently highlighted the importance of European technology companies remaining within the Union.