DORA (Digital Operational Resilience Act) became enforceable in January 2025 across the EU. It mandates ICT risk management and operational resilience evidence for financial entities — including non-EU vendors serving EU financial customers.
DORA applies extraterritorially — US fintech vendors selling to EU banks are in scope
ICT third-party risk register requirements mean banks must prove they've audited your logs
Incident classification and reporting timeframes (4 hours for major incidents) require always-on log accessibility
Operational resilience testing requires evidence trails that span months of activity
The Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) is an EU regulation that took effect on January 17, 2025. It establishes a unified framework for digital operational resilience in the financial sector, covering banks, insurance companies, investment firms, crypto-asset providers, and critically, their ICT third-party service providers. DORA mandates detailed logging requirements for ICT risk management, incident reporting, and resilience testing. SaaS platforms serving European financial institutions must demonstrate logging capabilities that support incident classification, root cause analysis, and regulatory reporting.
Retention requirement: 5 years minimum for ICT-related incident records (Article 10)
ICT-related incident detection events
Third-party access events
Operational resilience testing artifacts
Incident classification and escalation events
Recovery time / recovery point evidence
Financial entities shall put in place mechanisms to promptly detect anomalous activities, including ICT network performance issues and ICT-related incidents. Detection mechanisms shall enable logging of all ICT transactions and activities.
AuditKit: Real-time event capture with SIEM streaming for anomaly detection
Implement ICT-related incident management processes including indicators of compromise, classification, logging, and impact assessment.
AuditKit: Structured incident event schemas with cryptographic integrity for forensic analysis
Maintain logs of backup, restoration, and recovery activities. Verify the integrity of backed-up data through regular testing.
AuditKit: Immutable audit trails capture backup and recovery operations with Merkle proof verification
Monitor and log activities related to ICT third-party service providers including access, changes, and incidents.
AuditKit: Tenant-isolated logging enables third-party activity monitoring and reporting
SHA-256 hash chains and Merkle tree proofs provide mathematical proof that audit records have not been altered. This is increasingly the standard mechanism for satisfying DORA log-integrity requirements — assessors no longer accept policy-only controls.
Fintech platforms typically serve multiple customers from shared infrastructure. AuditKit enforces strict tenant isolation at the infrastructure level — your customers' audit data is logically separated, satisfying data segregation requirements common in DORA assessments.
Stream audit events to Splunk, Datadog, Elastic, or any SIEM your security team uses. DORA increasingly requires real-time monitoring, not just retained logs — AuditKit ships native streaming with at-least-once delivery semantics.
The AuditKit React viewer gives DORA auditors a clear interface for evidence review — filtered queries, integrity verification UI, and exportable evidence packages. Cuts auditor request cycles by 60-80% in typical engagements.
DORA applies to over 22,000 financial entities and ICT service providers in the EU
The regulation became effective on January 17, 2025
DORA explicitly requires logging of all ICT transactions and activities (Article 9)
ICT third-party service providers (including SaaS platforms) are directly regulated under DORA
Yes — DORA applies extraterritorially to any ICT provider serving EU financial entities. If your fintech SaaS has even one EU bank, payment institution, or investment firm as a customer, you are likely in DORA's third-party scope.
DORA requires initial notification of major ICT-related incidents within 4 hours, intermediate report within 72 hours, and final report within 1 month. AuditKit's real-time event streaming and queryable log API are essential for meeting these deadlines.
DORA (EU Regulation 2022/2554) requires financial entities to log all ICT transactions and activities (Article 9), maintain incident records for 5 years (Article 10), log backup and recovery operations (Article 12), and monitor third-party ICT provider activities (Article 15). AuditKit provides the immutable, tamper-proof logging that DORA demands.
Fintech companies need comprehensive logging of financial transactions, user authentication, KYC/AML activities, permission changes, and system access. Logs must be tamper-proof (PCI DSS 10.5), retained for 5-7 years (SOX/DORA), and available for real-time monitoring (BSA/AML). AuditKit provides all of these capabilities with SHA-256 hash chains and Merkle tree proofs.
Fintech buyers (banks, payment processors, brokerages) require SOC 2 Type II before onboarding any third-party vendor handling financial data. For fintech SaaS, SOC 2 is the price of admission to enterprise revenue.
PCI DSS Requirement 10 is non-negotiable for any fintech that touches cardholder data. v4.0 (effective March 2024) raised the bar on log integrity — hash-based tamper detection is now explicitly required.
SOX Section 404 internal controls evaluation applies to any fintech vendor whose services touch a publicly-traded company's financial reporting. If your fintech sells to public companies, your audit logs are part of their SOX scope.
ISO 27001 certification is increasingly required by European banks and financial institutions before vendor onboarding. The 2022 revision (ISO 27001:2022) makes logging requirements more prescriptive than SOC 2.
Tamper-proof audit trails that satisfy DORA requirements out of the box. Start from $99/mo.