The Federal Reserve plans to rebid about 50 billion dollars of information technology services contracts spanning five years, Bloomberg reported, a procurement that has drawn protest interest from the incumbent technology giants whose services run large parts of the central bank’s systems.
A central bank’s IT stack is not a normal outsourcing decision. The Fed’s systems carry payments, supervision and monetary operations, and the vendor list, Microsoft, Google and Amazon among the interested parties in the reporting, reads as a map of which cloud and services providers will sit inside the US financial system’s plumbing for the next decade. Protests and pre award challenges are standard in contracts of this size and have already begun, according to the reporting.
The item is single sourced to Bloomberg’s video report and is carried at grade C on that basis; the Fed has published no release of its own on the rebid.