Key Takeaways:
- DORA sets strict cybersecurity standards. Financial institutions must manage IT risks, report incidents, and protect sensitive data to comply and maintain operational resilience.
- Automation simplifies compliance. Use a unified CCM platform to streamline audits, secure communications, and speed up reporting.
- Proactive preparation reduces risk. Implement disaster recovery, single source archiving, and structured approval workflows to ensure compliance and reduce disruptions.
As financial institutions increasingly rely on digital technologies, the risks associated with cyber threats, IT disruptions, and operational failures have grown significantly. And as these threats grow in complexity and scale, the potential impact of a successful attack on the financial system could be catastrophic.
As a result, regulators are placing increased importance on cybersecurity within the financial sector. Enter, DORA.
What is the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA)?
DORA, the Digital Operational Resilience Act, is a European Union regulation designed to enhance and standardize cyber resilience in the financial sector across Europe.
DORA addresses the risk of cyber threats by setting strict, mandatory requirements for managing IT security, incident reporting, risk management, and third-party oversight for financial organizations and the information and communication technology (ICT) service providers supporting them.
The ultimate goal of DORA is to ensure operational resilience for financial institutions in the face of severe disruptions. Organizations that adhere to these regulations will:
- protect financial stability
- minimize IT and operational risks
- ensure compliance
How can you ensure that your organization meets DORA requirements effectively? Let’s explore what you need to know about the requirements themselves, and how the right customer communications management (CCM) solution can help.
What DORA Requires from Your Organization
To comply with DORA, financial institutions and ICT service providers must implement specific measures in key areas including ICT risk management, incident reporting, and data security and compliance.
Here’s a closer look at what these measures mean for your organization, and how EngageOne™ RapidCX from Precisely can help.
Requirement: ICT risk management
DORA mandates that organizations identify and mitigate IT risks before they become major disruptions.
An ICT Risk Management Framework is essential to address the specific digital risks your business faces. This framework should be comprehensive and integrated into your overall risk management strategies, so that you can monitor, prevent, and recover from IT failures and cyber incidents.
How Precisely Engage helps
- Disaster recovery capabilities that ensure resilience – including mirrored backups, auto-failover, and regular system testing
- Key benefit: Reduced downtime and faster recovery times (RTO/RPO), so you can keep your operations running smoothly
Requirement: Incident reporting
Fast and accurate reporting is critical to minimizing the impact of cyber threats and IT failures – which is why DORA requirements include robust processes for detecting, managing, and reporting significant ICT-related incidents.
These disruptions must be reported to the relevant authorities in a timely and structured manner.
How Precisely Engage helps:
- Audit trails that automatically log communication changes and deliveries – ensuring you have detailed records for compliance purposes
- Key benefit: Faster resolution of incidents and reduced time spent preparing audit reports
Requirement: Data security and compliance
DORA emphasizes data protection, requiring your business to safeguard sensitive customer information and meet industry regulations.
How Precisely Engage helps:
- Robust security controls (e.g. encryption of data in transit and at rest, regular third-party penetration testing) to protect sensitive information
- Certified third-party audits (e.g., SSAE-18 SOC 2 Type 2, ISO-27001) to ensure adherence to strict security standards
- Key benefit: Reduced risk of data breaches and regulatory fines, while improving customer trust.
The Cost of Non-Compliance with DORA
Failing to meet DORA requirements can severely disrupt business operations and expose your organization to financial and reputational harm.
- Operational Downtime: Lack of disaster recovery and incident response measures increases vulnerability to cyberattacks and IT failures. This leads to longer recovery times and potential service outages, directly impacting customer trust and revenue.
- Data Breaches and Legal Risks: Weak data protection invites breaches. DORA requires measures like PII masking and third-party audits (e.g., SOC 2, ISO-27001)—non-compliance puts sensitive information and legal standing at risk.
Read our eBook
Regulatory requirements are constantly evolving, making it challenging to balance personalized customer experiences with compliance and governance demands. Read this eBook and explore how you can ensure engaging communications while improving compliance.
How to Prepare for DORA
For large financial institutions with mature cybersecurity measures already in place, incremental changes may be enough to meet DORA requirements. However, if your business is a smaller entity, or lacks developed security postures, DORA represents a significant regulatory burden.
Wherever your organization may be on this journey right now, you can simplify the process by keeping some essential capabilities top of mind:
1. Audit trails for all changes and deliveries
By tracking every customer communication and system change, you ensure transparency and quick, easy accessibility for audits or incident investigations.
How do you achieve this? By automating the oversight and control of templates and copy standards – preventing costly errors while reducing time to delivery.
Project managers can assign clear and auditable tasks to compliance subject matter experts and decision-makers – and workflow comparisons highlight exactly what has changed, when, and by whom between template versions. This makes it easy to track changes, verify compliance, and provide evidence during audits.
Key benefit: Reduced regulatory fines and less time spent on compliance checks
2. Single source archive
DORA compliance requires organizations to store all customer communications securely so that they can be retrieved on demand – which makes a single source archive crucial.
A single source archive is a central repository, with controlled access, that keeps all of your customer communications securely stored in one place. It maintains a record of all communications, reducing the risk of lost or altered records.
By enabling quick and secure access to past interactions, you can confidently demonstrate compliance and respond to regulatory inquiries.
Key ROI: Improved compliance readiness and faster audit response times.
3. Built-in disaster recovery
You need to maintain continuous access to your customer communications, even during IT failures or cyberattacks.
Disaster recovery measures make this possible – including automatic failover and regular testing to maintain operational continuity.
Key ROI: Reduced operational downtime and financial losses during disruptions.
Steps to Achieve DORA Compliance with Precisely
EngageOne™ RapidCX is a single, unified CCM platform that enables you to personalize, automate, and audit customer communications for stronger compliance.
Here’s a look at how you can make sure you’re meeting the strict requirements of DORA and other evolving regulations using our platform:
1. Centralize communication management
DORA requires end-to-end oversight of financial communications, and that’s the power of a unified CCM.
Bring together your critical business systems, CRMS, claims, and more – all while ensuring that customer interactions are:
- secure
- trackable
- compliant
This minimizes the risk of inconsistencies, compliance gaps, and audit challenges.
2. Automate compliance processes
Manual compliance tracking is slow and error prone – but by automating compliance workflows, you enable:
- configurable approval workflows to eliminate unauthorized changes
- automated reporting to reduce errors and save time with regulatory submissions
3. Prepare for audits
Effortlessly retrieve records and demonstrate compliance – streamlining complex, tedious audit preparation:
- Built-in audit trails log every communication and system update
- Secure archiving ensures fast access to historical data when regulators request it
Move Forward with Enhanced Compliance
DORA is reshaping how financial institutions and ICT service providers manage operational resilience and cybersecurity – and if you need to build up your safeguards, the time to act is now.
With EngageOne™ RapidCX, you can simplify compliance by implementing:
- disaster recovery and automated resilience testing to reduce IT risks
- secure audit trails and centralized records for easy reporting
- data protection measures that prevent security breaches and regulatory fines
So, don’t wait – take steps today to ensure that your organization will be able to stay resilient and compliant with the requirements of DORA and other regulations.
Discover additional best practices for managing regulatory risks and improving governance with our eBook: The 5 Governance Controls You Need to Stay Ahead of Change This Year.
