Back to Blog
Strengthening Financial Security and Resilience: SCA and DORA
One of the most significant upcoming regulations in the financial industry is undoubtedly the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA), which will take effect on January 17, 2025. While you may already be familiar with DORA, let's briefly recap its importance.
DORA aims to enhance the IT security of financial entities by mandating robust and comprehensive IT risk management frameworks. This regulation will impact banks, payment providers, other financial entities, and key ICT providers, emphasizing the need for resilience against operational disruptions. In this context, OKAY plays a crucial role as a critical ICT third-party vendor.
The Importance of SCA in Financial Transactions
Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) is an essential component in the payment chain. If SCA were to fail, customers of financial institutions would be unable to authenticate during a transaction, thereby preventing the completion of these transactions. As an organization, OKAY is closely examining the implications of DORA to ensure our services align with these new regulations.
Sign Up for Our Newsletter
Unlock updates, insights, and exclusive content delivered to you.
How OKAY Supports Financial Institutions under DORA
Security Enhancements:
- Rigorous Audits and Testing: OKAY’s solutions have been audited by SRC GmbH and successfully tested through white-hacking services.
- Multiple Security Mechanisms: During transaction verification, our solution employs approximately ten security mechanisms to prevent hacks, ensuring an airtight environment around the authentication process to thwart even the most innovative and unknown attacks.
- Versatile Authentication Solutions: Initially designed to secure transactions for banking apps, OKAY can also be integrated into any non-banking related authentication app, replacing passwords and enhancing overall protection against cyber threats for access to any vital asset within your organisation.
- Focus on privacy: The OKAY platform is designed to be deployed in our customer’s clouds, which means that any confidential information passing through doesn’t leave your own systems. This makes GDPR compliance a lot easier.
Resilience Measures:
- Cloud-Ready Platform: The OKAY platform is fully cloud-ready, deployed on our customers' clouds, mitigating risks associated with third-party reliance and security. There is no direct link to our own cloud systems, ensuring greater security.
- High Availability and Disaster Recovery: We assist in configuring high availability and disaster recovery (HA-DR) architectures around our technology within your cloud environment, tailored to your needs.
- Backup Authentication Systems: Given our low entry-level price, you can deploy an OKAY platform as a backup authentication system to the one in use, to ensure service continuity.
- Remote Dial Service: For current OKAY platform users, we offer a remote dial service as a resilient fallback, operating independently from the main OKAY backend. If your app including the embedded OKAY SDKs go down, customers can receive an OTP code via automated voice call to complete transactions.
For further information on how we can assist you in building the appropriate SCA fallback solutions and ensuring compliance with DORA, please do not hesitate to contact us.