ISO 27001 readiness for Financial Services.
Privileged access, trading and payment continuity, transaction evidence, and vendor oversight under real regulatory pressure. Your regulator and your ISO auditor ask overlapping questions - the overlay opens with both sets mapped to the same Annex A controls so you answer them once.
- Regulatory regimes pre-mapped
- MiFID II · PSD2 · DORA · NIS2
- Sector risks in the register
- Trading + payment
- Retention + logging rules included
- Financial-grade
ISO 27001 Annex A controls ship with a ready-made cross-walk to each regime, so you run one integrated control framework and stop paying for duplicate evidence collections.
Privileged access, segregation-of-duties gaps, settlement errors, provider concentration, transaction immutability - seeded with likelihood × impact defaults and links to Annex A.
Evidence and audit logs stored with retention schedules that match MiFID / PSD2 / DORA requirements - retention is a compliance obligation, not something you engineer from scratch.
Focus areas pre-loaded for this profile
- Privileged access and segregation of duties
- Trading and payment system continuity + failover
- Transaction logging and dispute evidence
- Liquidity and payment provider governance
- Local licensing obligations (MiFID II, PSD2, and similar)
The friction Financial Services teams hit before AFEND.
- 01Multiple regulators watching the same controls: local licensing authority, payment scheme rules, DORA/NIS2 operational resilience obligations, and the ISO auditor.
- 02Trading and payment availability measured in seconds, not pages - downtime is instantly a customer incident and sometimes a regulatory filing.
- 03Privileged operations (wire approvals, limit overrides, kill-switch access) need segregation of duties that can survive a regulator's six-month look-back.
- 04Vendor concentration risk: your payment rail, your pricing data, and your settlement bank are all single points of failure that auditors will map.
- 05PII, KYC, and transaction history all live in the same database - data classification and retention need to work for AML, GDPR, and ISO 27001 simultaneously.
The questions an external auditor opens with.
Not the Annex A wording. The real questions your auditor puts in the Stage 1 interview - and that AFEND makes answerable by construction.
- Q1The last quarter's privileged-action log: who overrode a limit, who approved it, evidence of the four-eyes check.
- Q2Your last DR test - not the plan, the actual cut-over with timing, success criteria, and corrective actions.
- Q3Transaction immutability: show that a trade or payment record cannot be altered retrospectively.
- Q4Your vendor attestations for the top 5 providers by concentration risk (payment rail, market data, clearing).
- Q5The mapping between ISO 27001 Annex A and your sector obligation (MiFID II Art. 16, PSD2 SCA, DORA ICT risk).
Annex A controls the auditor will press on for Financial Services.
All 93 Annex A controls go through the Statement of Applicability. These six get disproportionate scrutiny in financial services engagements - AFEND surfaces them on the SoA dashboard so you approve them first.
- A.5.3
- The regulator's most-requested artefact. Dealing desk separated from settlement; trade entry separated from approval; admin access separated from audit log review.
- A.5.19
- Payment providers, market data vendors, clearing houses. Expect a vendor register with risk tier, attestation, and next review date.
- A.5.29
- Business continuity isn't a binder. Evidence of a dated cut-over test - and what broke - is the control.
- A.5.30
- DORA expects ICT-specific continuity, not just the office-burned-down scenario. AFEND maps ICT failure modes to A.5.30.
- A.8.2
- Break-glass, wire approvals, kill-switches. Auditors want to see last-used dates and revocation timestamps.
- A.8.15
- Tamper-evident, retained for the regulator-mandated period, queryable under a dispute request.
Segregation of duties
Information security in supplier relationships
Information security during disruption
ICT readiness for business continuity
Privileged access rights
Logging
Artefacts the readiness pack must contain.
Mapped to the Annex A controls above. AFEND’s evidence room accepts file uploads, external-system links, and review cycles; the auditor export bundles them in the expected structure.
- Privileged-action register (wire approvals, limit overrides) with dual-approval timestamps
- DR / failover test record - actual cut-over, not tabletop
- Vendor attestations for top-5 concentration risks
- Transaction log immutability check (hash chain or append-only store)
- Quarterly access review for trading, settlement, and operations roles
- Incident register mapped to regulatory filing triggers (PSD2 major-incident, MiFID II)
- Conflicts-of-interest register for personnel with market-sensitive access
Mistakes we see every Financial Services team repeat.
Anti-pattern
Treating ISO 27001, MiFID II, PSD2, and DORA as four parallel programmes.
Fix
They share the majority of the controls. Run one integrated control framework in AFEND, cross-map to each obligation in the SoA, and stop paying for duplicate evidence collections.
Anti-pattern
Business-continuity binders that have not been tested recently.
Fix
Schedule a cut-over on a rotating service on a predictable cadence. A dated record replaces four pages of narrative with one paragraph of proof.
Anti-pattern
Privileged access reviewed infrequently, evidenced with a spreadsheet screenshot.
Fix
Tie the review to the HR joiner/mover/leaver process and export on a recurring cadence. Auditors forgive noisy evidence far more than stale evidence.
Anti-pattern
Vendor oversight done as an onboarding exercise and then forgotten.
Fix
Risk-tier the vendors, set review cadence per tier, keep the evidence in the vendor register. AFEND's register links to the SoA entries already.
Questions Financial Services buyers ask us.
We're regulated under DORA starting 2025 - does ISO 27001 help or conflict?
Help. DORA's ICT risk management, resilience testing, and third-party risk requirements overlap heavily with ISO 27001 Annex A. AFEND comes with a DORA → Annex A mapping you can reuse.
Our regulator already audits us. Why add an ISO audit?
Regulator audits prove compliance with the specific licence. An ISO 27001 certificate is the credential your enterprise clients, banking partners, and cross-border counterparties actually ask for. The two reinforce each other - the work you do for one produces most of the evidence for the other.
How do we handle transaction logs under 'right to be forgotten' GDPR requests?
You don't delete them. Financial record retention is a legal obligation that overrides erasure under GDPR Art. 17(3)(b). AFEND's obligations register records the legal basis so auditors see it's a decision, not an oversight.
Do we need ISO 27001 to process card payments?
PCI DSS is the direct payment-card requirement. But enterprise merchants and banking partners routinely list ISO 27001 as a requirement for vendor approval - often alongside PCI DSS. They're complementary, not alternatives.
Open a workspace with the Financial Services overlay already loaded.
14-day trial, no credit card. The Financial Services risk library, the six core controls, and the evidence scaffolding above are pre-seeded the moment you choose this industry at setup.